Sarah Vowell Quotes

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

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

“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

“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, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to Hell.”

— Sarah Vowell

“You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.”

— Sarah Vowell

“Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.”

— 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

“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 found out he had attended its dedication, that helped focus it further.”

— Sarah Vowell

“I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.”

— Sarah Vowell

“I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.”

— Sarah Vowell

“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 the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.”

— Sarah Vowell

“A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.”

— 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

“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

“Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.”

— Sarah Vowell

“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

“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

For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses
an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.

— Sarah Vowell

“Radio is the playground of coincidence.”

— Sarah Vowell

My lips are chapped from the winds of change.

— Sarah Vowell

“The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That's what subsequent generations lost. From New England's Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution.”

— Sarah Vowell

To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic informative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free.

— Sarah Vowell

He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.

— Sarah Vowell

I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes.

— Sarah Vowell

“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

“Um," I asked, "isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else?" Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes "enslaved African" sound nonchalant. As in "Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.”

— Sarah Vowell

“I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.”

— Sarah Vowell

“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

“(The subject of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community's most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher's attorney on The O.C. might defend his clients.)”

— Sarah Vowell

“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

“But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine.”

— Sarah Vowell

“Looking back, I wonder why a gangster movie kidnapped my life. The Godfather had nothing to do with me. I was a feminist, not Italian, and I went to school at Montana State. I had never set foot in New York, thought ravioli came only in a can, and wasn't blind to the fact that all the women in the film were either virgins, mothers, whores, or Diane Keaton.”

— Sarah Vowell

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.

— Sarah Vowell

“We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.
We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)”

— Sarah Vowell

“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

I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race.

— Sarah Vowell

“Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. "We, the women of the United States," she told the bronze Lafayette, "denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.”

— Sarah Vowell

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child's ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette's defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR.

— Sarah Vowell

“I am not a bed-and breakfast person. I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're "quaint," a polite way of saying "no TV." They are "romantic," i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're "cozy," meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.”

— Sarah Vowell

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

“In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.”

— Sarah Vowell

“The neighborhood of Gramercy Park, where Edwin used to live, was built to look like London, which is to say that its considerable beauty is skin deep while its heart beats with the ugliness of monarchy. And at its very center, inside the gates keeping out the riffraff that is all New York, stands the statue of the sad and fancy Edwin Booth, dressed as Hamlet, his signature role.”

— Sarah Vowell

“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

“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

“I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I'll admit, that's what I was expecting to find at Oneida. The 19th century equivalent of sharing a house with the friend who brought home a crazy drifter to sleep on our couch - a man who claimed the local car dealership was built out of 'needles nourishing the earth'. The week before I went to Oneida, I had that claustrophobic dream again - that I had to move back in with the girl who claimed to enjoy baking and always promised tomorrow was going to be 'Muffin Day!' even though tomorrow was never Muffin Day. It was Muffin Day maybe once.”

— Sarah Vowell

“Mania for exact change can be off-putting for a traveler, what with getting yelled at by cashiers and cab drivers all day long for the crime of paying a sixteen-euro fare with a twenty-euro note. She said that it was nothing personal, that the French are naturally aggressive, especially with one another. Which I suppose is a form of equality, but not the sweet kind experienced by Lafayette.”

— Sarah Vowell

Lafayette took umbrage - just gobs and gobs of umbrage - at the patriots' vilification of his countrymen for leaving Newport.

— Sarah Vowell

“Before the verb "to electrocute" came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.”

— Sarah Vowell

“Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.”

— Sarah Vowell

“You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.”

— Sarah Vowell