266 Quotes by Sarah Vowell

But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I’m dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it’s 1980. Once I erupt, they’ll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose “The World Turned Upside Down.

Most people don’t like to talk about violent historical death.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.

And the Americans were told they were going to attack this heavily defended position with unloaded muskets, just with their fixed bayonets. It was a nighttime attack and they didn’t want to be shooting each other. They were commanded by that gentleman on your ten-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton, the future secretary of the Treasury.

There seems to be no end to the satisfaction one gets in having one’s opinions confirmed.

The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.

Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free?

Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer.