Sarah Vowell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Sarah Vowell on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

My lips are chapped from the winds of change.

I resist the urge to raise my hand and utter the four most reassuring words in the English language: I know a guy.

Technically, it's a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.

Don't bring up McKinley. Don't bring up McKinley.

As if I was never nicknamed 'Wednesday' as in 'Adams'.

It requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace ...

Radio is the playground of coincidence.

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.

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.

Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.

I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed.

In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.

The air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.

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)

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

The only people who know about me are people who would know about me.

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

Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.

I'm not really the scented envelope kid of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffy-lite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind.

The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.

Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.

So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.

I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

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

Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?

There is something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving - and old map - for another - American money.

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.

What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

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.

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

There seems to be no end to the satisfaction one gets in having one's opinions confirmed.

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories.

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.

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

Americans' fatal tendency of disunion.

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

If there is a recurring theme in Garfield's diaries it's this: I'd rather be reading.

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

Behind every bad law, a deep fear.

After Hymns and tears, they boarded the brig Thaddeus, a vessel so crappy, it made the Mayflower look like the QE2.

There's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.

Even writers need relief from words.

Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'?

I am pro-plaque.

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.

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

Like a lot of once devout people who have lost their faith, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and in my heart.

My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.

Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.

No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.

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

Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?

Did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence - applied

I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.

[I]deas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences.

Luther's point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale:

My audience is going to die before I do.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

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.

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

She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).

Freedom of expression truly exists only when a society's most repugnant nitwits are allowed to spew their nonsense in public.

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.

Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?

The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

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.

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter

I love reading and am always stuck in one labrinth of letters or other

I still believe in public radio's potential. Because it's the one mass medium that's still crafted almost entirely by true believers.

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.

Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette is buried under dirt from Bunker Hill.

The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say.

A humble, bootstrappy patriot, Knox wooed, then married Lucy Flucker, the highbrow daughter of the Loyalist governor of the province of Massachusetts.

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.

a man without birth, without courage, without conduct. For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master.

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.