Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We’re not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you’re more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award.”

— David Sedaris

102. “Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. Ions might charge the air but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination – my imagination, anyway.”

— David Sedaris

103. “Another thing I love about the beach is sitting in the sun, mainly for the lazy kind of talk it generates. A person can say anything with lotion on, and I’m more than willing to listen.”

— David Sedaris

104. “It’s unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.”

— David Sedaris

105. “The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.”

— David Sedaris

106. “Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.”

— David Sedaris

107. “And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I’d remind him that these were pests – disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware.”

— David Sedaris

108. “Teaching you is like having a cesarean section every day of the week.”

— David Sedaris

109. “I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.”

— David Sedaris

110. “At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.”

— David Sedaris

111. “He’s as nutty as a vegan T-bone.”

— David Sedaris

112. “Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.”

— David Sedaris

113. “It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.”

— David Sedaris

114. “I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.”

— David Sedaris

115. “In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.”

— David Sedaris

116. “Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”

— David Sedaris

117. “Angels, she said, were God’s way of saying howdy.”

— David Sedaris

118. “What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them.”

— David Sedaris

119. “I think it’s good to have the alone time. Well, I kind of have to, because I have to be alone in order to work, so I have alone time. And then I go on tour and I have being-around-people time.”

— David Sedaris

120. “This is where my mom and dad were the night Martin Luther King was assassinated,” I said to Hugh after we had ordered. “Not here at the airport, obviously, but at their original location downtown.” I told him how someone had stepped out of the kitchen to announce the news, and how everyone but my parents had applauded. “Our family hadn’t been in the South very long, and that was a real eye-opener.”

— David Sedaris

121. “The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain old-fashioned fear.”

— David Sedaris

122. “It’s safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.”

— David Sedaris

123. “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.”

— David Sedaris

124. “I’m surrounded by people who have more money than they know what to do with, and none of them have earned it.”

— David Sedaris

125. “I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.”

— David Sedaris

126. “I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn’t want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.”

— David Sedaris

127. “I didn’t know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.”

— David Sedaris

128. “For that’s all Gatorade ever tastes like – its color. Over the period that I had my stomach virus, I tried them all: blue, red, green, yellow, orange, and a new opaque one that tasted opaque.”

— David Sedaris

129. “A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.”

— David Sedaris

130. “Besides, if I wanted to hear people speaking wall-to-wall French, all I had to do was remove my headphones and participate in what is known as ‘real life,’ a concept as uninviting as a shampoo cocktail.”

— David Sedaris

131. “I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he’s unable to stand. “If only I’d paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,” he says. I see Hugh, drying his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket, then crying even harder when he remembers I bought it for him.”

— David Sedaris

132. “As a foreigner in London, I like that there are so many other foreigners.”

— David Sedaris

133. “All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.”

— David Sedaris

134. “When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there’s a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.”

— David Sedaris

135. “Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.”

— David Sedaris

136. “I cried for it all and wondered why so few songs were written about cats.”

— David Sedaris

137. “The approach of Christmas signifies three things: bad movies, unforgivable television, and even worse theater. I’m talking bone-crushing theater, the type our ancient ancestors used to oppress their enemies before the invention of the stretching rack.”

— David Sedaris

138. “At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?”

— David Sedaris

139. “Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you’re in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can’t be thought of as cute.”

— David Sedaris

140. “I’m not a misogynist. I’m a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally.”

— David Sedaris

141. “Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I’ve grown less likable over the years, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to meet people. The initial introduction – the shaking-hands part – I can still manage. It’s the follow-up that throws me. Who calls whom, and how often? What if you decide after the second or third meeting that you don’t really like this person? Up to what point are you allowed to back out?”

— David Sedaris

142. “I sometimes read books on my iPad.”

— David Sedaris

143. “Poor, chubby Annette Kelper, who desperately tries to pretend that nobody notices the fact that she’s balding on top of her head. That’s right. Look closely – balding just like a man. Perhaps Randy feels sorry for chrome-dome Annette.”

— David Sedaris

144. “Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.”

— David Sedaris

145. “When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves. We’re not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. “I haven’t liked you since 2002,” he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.”

— David Sedaris

146. “There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.”

— David Sedaris

147. “Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.”

— David Sedaris

148. “The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.”

— David Sedaris

149. “Shopping has nothing to do with money. If you have it, you go to stores and galleries, and if not, you haunt flea markets or Goodwills. Never, though, do you not do it, choosing instead to visit a park or a temple or some cultural institution where they don’t sell things.”

— David Sedaris

150. “Sometimes with ‘The New Yorker,’ they have grammar rules that just don’t feel right in my mouth.”

— David Sedaris