694 Quotes by David Sedaris

What if I’d wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn’t really matter? Try as I might, I still can’t wrap my mind around it.

If I’m riding my bike I just replay the same scenarios over and over in my head, like I haven’t had a new mental adventure since high school. So that’s what I like about books on tape, so my mind can’t wander anywhere.

The reverend insists we occupy the first pew. He rang us up not long ago, tipsy – he’s a tippler – saying that our faces brought him closer to God. And it’s true, we’re terribly good-looking people.

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso.

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof.

A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. ‘My bad,’ for example, and ‘I’ve got your back’ and ‘You go, girlfriend.’ They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is you thing, in which case- knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder.

Today the teacher called me a sadist. I tried to say that was like the pot calling the kettle black but came out with something closer to “That is like a pan saying to a dark pan, ‘You are a pan.

Ebola, not the thousands who had died of it in Africa but the single person who had it in Dallas.