Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?”

— David Sedaris

152. “My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they’re shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through.”

— David Sedaris

153. “I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can’t open and close the door whenever they feel like it.”

— David Sedaris

154. “Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you’ll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.”

— David Sedaris

155. “That man tried to picka my frienda’s pocketoni!”

— David Sedaris

156. “My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.”

— David Sedaris

157. “The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I’ve discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, “I want to love, I want to live...”

— David Sedaris

158. “I don’t like travelling if I know I have to write about it.”

— David Sedaris

159. “We were standing near the Lollipop Forest when we realized that Santa is an anagram of Satan... Overhearing the customers we would substitute the Satan for the world Santa.”

— David Sedaris

160. “They’re hungry for something they know nothing about, but we, we know all too well that the price of fame is the loss of privacy.”

— David Sedaris

161. “Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend.”

— David Sedaris

162. “I’ve been around for nearly half a century, yet still I’m afraid of everything and everyone. A child sits beside me on a plane and I make conversation, thinking how stupid I must sound. The downstairs neighbors invite me to a party and, after claiming that I have a previous engagement, I spend the entire evening confined to my bed, afraid to walk around because they might hear my footsteps.”

— David Sedaris

163. “I won’t put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises – namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.”

— David Sedaris

164. “Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright?”

— David Sedaris

165. “I can’t be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Therefore you keep the crocheted owl given to you by your second-youngest sister and accidentally on purpose drop the mug that reads “Owl Love You Always” and was sent by someone who clearly never knew you to begin with.”

— David Sedaris

166. “Story-telling is pivotal to our well-being, as are nonethnic jokes and riddles.”

— David Sedaris

167. “The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.”

— David Sedaris

168. “In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience.”

— David Sedaris

169. “While the builders worked on the cottage, Hugh lived in what used to be the stable but was later converted into a guesthouse, the kind you’d have if you wanted to either discourage guests or contain them in one spot while slowly depressing them to death.”

— David Sedaris

170. “Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.”

— David Sedaris

171. “She just happens to be my father, young man, and I’d appreciate it of you’d show her a little respect.”

— David Sedaris

172. “I don’t worry about being exposed. When I’m writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don’t write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.”

— David Sedaris

173. “The thing about Hawaii, at least the part that is geared toward tourists, is that it’s exactly what it promises to be. Step off the plane, and someone places a lei around your neck, as if it were something you had earned – an Olympic medal for sitting on your ass. Raise a hand above your shoulder and, no matter where you are, a drink will appear: something served in a hollowed-out pineapple, or perhaps in a coconut that’s been sawed in half. Just like in the time before glasses! you think.”

— David Sedaris

174. “I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you’re bad he comes to your house and steals things.”

— David Sedaris

175. “What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don’t normally sneak up on people. Unless they’ve derailed, you pretty much know where to find them.”

— David Sedaris

176. “The landscape is best described as ‘pedestrian hostile.’ It’s pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.”

— David Sedaris

177. “But at the end of every show we would realize that true happiness often lies where you very least expect it. It might arrive in a form of a gentle breeze or a handful of peanuts, but when it came, we would seize it with our own brand of folksy wisdom.”

— David Sedaris

178. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,? I hear. ‘Can we please just try to have a good time?’ This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.”

— David Sedaris

179. “The part of my plan that made old people uncomfortable, that exposed them for the bigots they were – and on a Sunday! – still appealed to me.”

— David Sedaris

180. “I’m sad to be finishing school. I liked being in college. It was respectable to be a student. You get discount admissions all over town, and it makes you work.”

— David Sedaris

181. “After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,” I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.”

— David Sedaris

182. “This is a busy week with me and lunatics, whom I tend to see as either signs or messengers.”

— David Sedaris

183. “My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.”

— David Sedaris

184. “Half the people I know have dead animals in their freezers: reptiles, birds, mammals. Is that normal?”

— David Sedaris

185. “Whenever I write about my family, I start by getting my parent’s approval. I like to think I write about them with obvious affection. When it comes to the people I’m related to, I consider myself to be very lucky.”

— David Sedaris

186. “I see his presidential bid as just another commercial for himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to name the Hamburglar as his running mate.”

— David Sedaris

187. “I meet people at book signings. My record now, for signing, is ten and a half hours in one sitting.”

— David Sedaris

188. “You look like some cousin of mine.” The latter would work only if you were Asian, but even then it’s a little creepy, the implication being “the cousin I have always wanted to undress and ejaculate on.”

— David Sedaris

189. “We sweat for our pretensions. It.”

— David Sedaris

190. “I always think it’s a good policy to like the people who like you.”

— David Sedaris

191. “On the plane from Paris I heard a man say, “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is order a Big Gulp. I’m going to supersize everything!” He said he’d been thirsty the entire time he was in Paris, and though I’d never thought about it, if you’re used to carrying a trash-can-size cup filled with crushed ice and soda, I suppose it would be hard to spend a few weeks in Europe.”

— David Sedaris

192. “Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. “That’s fine,” I said, “but Santa’s also going to need a stool sample.”

— David Sedaris

193. “Other people’s pain is uninteresting. My own, though, is spellbinding.”

— David Sedaris

194. “He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.”

— David Sedaris

195. “There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten.”

— David Sedaris

196. “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.”

— David Sedaris

197. “Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep sort of just comes.”

— David Sedaris

198. “College is the best thing that can ever happen to you,” my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking...”

— David Sedaris

199. “Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it’s there but doesn’t for the life of him understand why.”

— David Sedaris

200. “I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?”

— David Sedaris