Top 100 Sarah Vowell Quotes
#1. Then Cotton quotes Luke 12:48. "To whom much is given, of him God will require the more." Of course there's a catch, Spider-Man. When God is the landlord, Cotton says, "defraud him not of his rent." The price? Obedience.
Sarah Vowell
#2. American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.
Sarah Vowell
#3. that August an ominous and unprecedented British armada of 450 ships and boats carrying forty-five thousand British soldiers and sailors, as well as the rented Germanic troops known as the Hessians (of Headless Horseman fame), assembled in New York Harbor
Sarah Vowell
#4. Technically, it's a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.
Sarah Vowell
#5. On the illusive "Monsieur Hortalez." When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before.
Sarah Vowell
#6. 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
#7. Acts 16:9 is the meddler's motto, simultaneously selfless and self-serving, generous but stuck-up. Into every generation of Americans is born a new crop of buttinskys sniffing out the latest Macedonia that may or may not want their help.
Sarah Vowell
#8. I probably am a cranky writer, but I am actually a fairly nice, normal person. Since I'm a grouchy writer, of course I have friends whose books are doing way better than mine.
Sarah Vowell
#9. 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
#10. The medieval pilgrimage routes, in which Christians walked from church to church to commune with the innards of saints, are the beginnings of the modern tourism industry.
Sarah Vowell
#11. I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates.
Sarah Vowell
#12. Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
Sarah Vowell
#14. Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.
Sarah Vowell
#15. You think this is a mess? New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump! I'm not pretending the inside is any different from the outside anymore!
Sarah Vowell
#16. So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.
Sarah Vowell
#17. With only sixty men to hold off four hundred Americans, the British commander of the redoubt, a Major Campbell, surrendered to Laurens. Afterward, when an unhinged captain from New Hampshire threatened Campbell with his bayonet, Hamilton stepped between them, because rules were rules.
Sarah Vowell
#18. When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.
Sarah Vowell
#19. That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary.
Sarah Vowell
#20. Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.
Sarah Vowell
#21. You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
Sarah Vowell
#22. Honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.
Sarah Vowell
#23. Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.
Sarah Vowell
#24. Steuben explained to his friend, "You say to your soldier, 'Do this,' and he does it; but I am obliged to say, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and then he does it.
Sarah Vowell
#25. The air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.
Sarah Vowell
#26. With temperatures dropping, how could men without shirts expect to fend off opponents so blatantly well equipped with outerwear that they were nicknamed the redcoats?
Sarah Vowell
#27. Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?
Sarah Vowell
#28. Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?
Sarah Vowell
#29. What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
Sarah Vowell
#30. That's what we Americans do when we find a place that's really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.
Sarah Vowell
#31. Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
Sarah Vowell
#32. Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.
Sarah Vowell
#33. The victory at Trenton boosted morale among the troops, the Congress, and the people to a degree possibly unwarranted by winning back a town in New Jersey, what with it being a town in New Jersey.
Sarah Vowell
#34. 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.
Sarah Vowell
#35. Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.
Sarah Vowell
#36. French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I've ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head.
Sarah Vowell
#37. Don't bring up McKinley. Don't bring up McKinley.
Sarah Vowell
#38. Lafayette lifted his glass at one reception to toast 'the perpetual union of the United States,' adding, 'it has always saved us in time of storm; one day it will save the world.'" Whether
Sarah Vowell
#39. In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
Sarah Vowell
#40. The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.
Sarah Vowell
#41. 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 was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.
Sarah Vowell
#42. Hamilton, aware the war was winding down and that this was likely his last shot at glory, went over Lafayette's head and appealed to Washington, who overruled Lafayette and allowed Hamilton to lead.
Sarah Vowell
#43. I talk about going to [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying
when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to
wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water' ... the failure of
my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.
Sarah Vowell
#44. Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
Sarah Vowell
#45. The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.
Sarah Vowell
#46. it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces.
Sarah Vowell
#47. While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.
Sarah Vowell
#48. How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along? While
Sarah Vowell
#49. Cotton says, "If God be the gardener, who shall pluck up what he sets down?" Hear that, Indians? No weeding of the white people allowed. Unless they're Catholic. Or one of those Satan-worshipping Virginians.
Sarah Vowell
#50. So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox.
Sarah Vowell
#51. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors.
Sarah Vowell
#52. Yes, they're a little biased there, I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they're a little biased in Mudd's favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is like saying cheese steaks are kind of associated with Philadelphia.
Sarah Vowell
#53. In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
Sarah Vowell
#54. We the people have never agreed on much of anything. ... [D]isunity is the through-line in the national plot. Not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privileged.
Sarah Vowell
#55. That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.
Sarah Vowell
#57. I have a policy about that word "soul." It is strictly prohibited except in cases of converstations having to do with okra recipes or Marvin Gaye.
Sarah Vowell
#58. Not that there wasn't still plenty of subduing to do here in North America. "Even within our own limits, the savage still lights his death fires, to appease the wrath of an idol," he points out. What's worse, to the "north, there is an immense region of palpable darkness." (Hi, Canada!)
Sarah Vowell
#59. The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say.
Sarah Vowell
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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 me nuts. That lost colony drove me crazy.
Sarah Vowell
#63. I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true.
Sarah Vowell
#64. The fact that a child that age was allowed to go out looking for the four-legged serial killer that the king has dispatched his personal gun-bearer to track down speaks of an older, hands-off parenting style.
Sarah Vowell
#65. Lafayette took umbrage - just gobs and gobs of umbrage - at the patriots' vilification of his countrymen for leaving Newport.
Sarah Vowell
#66. I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.
Sarah Vowell
#67. The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.
Sarah Vowell
#68. In America, on the ordinate plane of faith versus reason, the x-axis of faith intersects with the y-axis of reason at the zero point of "I don't give a damn what you think".
Sarah Vowell
#69. I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
Sarah Vowell
#70. Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
Sarah Vowell
#71. No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.
Sarah Vowell
#72. His pictures of this region summarize the soulful emptiness of a country where, as Gertrude Stein observed, 'there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.
Sarah Vowell
#73. We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.
Sarah Vowell
#74. Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.
Sarah Vowell
#75. As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us.
Sarah Vowell
#76. I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.
Sarah Vowell
#77. There's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.
Sarah Vowell
#78. In other words, the most ardent republicans since the fall of Rome were asking their king to help them prevail over the representative legislature of the world's oldest constitutional monarchy, the great symbol and protector of British freedom. From
Sarah Vowell
#79. While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man's-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.
Sarah Vowell
#80. Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette is buried under dirt from Bunker Hill.
Sarah Vowell
#81. In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.
Sarah Vowell
#82. It requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace ...
Sarah Vowell
#83. 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
#84. Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Sarah Vowell
#85. there is anything to be learned from the conspiracy - other than when in doubt, bet on George Washington - it is to beware the pitfalls of certainty.
Sarah Vowell
#86. Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.
Sarah Vowell
#87. If there is a recurring theme in Garfield's diaries it's this: I'd rather be reading.
Sarah Vowell
#88. You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.
Sarah Vowell
#89. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#91. Lafayette, on the other hand, was more of a make-your-own-destiny type of fellow, disobeying orders from the king and abandoning a pregnant girl for an entirely optional adventure.
Sarah Vowell
#92. One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington's tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington "gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad." On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?
Sarah Vowell
#93. Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.
Sarah Vowell
#94. I revere the Bill of Rights, but at the same time I believe that anyone who's using three or more of them at a time is hogging them too much. (152)
Sarah Vowell
#95. As if I was never nicknamed 'Wednesday' as in 'Adams'.
Sarah Vowell
#96. There is a jarring disconnect between what I want my real-life intelligence officers to be doing versus what I want my fake TV intelligence officers to be doing.
Sarah Vowell
#97. Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.
Sarah Vowell
#98. 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 people are kind of old.
Sarah Vowell
#99. I've encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I've never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy's coming home.
Sarah Vowell
#100. I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.
Sarah Vowell
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