Sarah Vowell Quotes

81 quotes in 1611 categories

• Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on…
• 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…
• I'm always disappointed when I see the word 'Puritan' tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me,…
• There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
• 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,…
• Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.
• I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those…
• The whole point of Louis Armstrong is that no one can really figure him out. There was a while where I thought you could try.
• In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
• Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all…
• Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?
• 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…
• I discovered that Robert Todd Lincoln was there for each of the first three assassinations. I wanted to write about the Lincoln Memorial, so when…
• I hated the lost colony; in second grade, we were doing American History, and they said, We don't know what happened to them. That drove…
• What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
• There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord's Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help…
• 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…
• I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There…
• I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
• History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Browse Sarah Vowell Quotes by Category