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I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
Sarah Vowell -
If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
Sarah Vowell
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Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.
Sarah Vowell -
After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, "When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us."
Sarah Vowell -
Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.
Sarah Vowell -
No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead - Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It's a mind-set of "Here I come to save the day" versus "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
Sarah Vowell -
History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.
Sarah Vowell -
Even writers need relief from words.
Sarah Vowell
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If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.
Sarah Vowell -
What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
Sarah Vowell -
In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
Sarah Vowell -
You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.
Sarah Vowell -
The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.
Sarah Vowell -
In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Sarah Vowell
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The people who visit the Lincoln memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren
Sarah Vowell -
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War-when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.
Sarah Vowell -
I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.
Sarah Vowell -
My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.
Sarah Vowell -
I still believe in public radio's potential. Because it's the one mass medium that's still crafted almost entirely by true believers.
Sarah Vowell -
Behind every bad law, a deep fear.
Sarah Vowell
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Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.
Sarah Vowell -
There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine; it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one of the most thrilling phrases in the English language: 'It was on this spot…' My fantasy is to one day become a docent.
Sarah Vowell -
Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.
Sarah Vowell -
Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'?
Sarah Vowell