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"It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn't conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them."
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"A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man."

"We are not as important to most people as we are to ourselves. As a matter of fact, we are-to most people-not important at all."

"Instead of breaking or cherry-picking the rules, many just follow the inner rules, which have been instilled during their lifetime and have subtly permeated their thinking. They value rules, as it offers the ravishment of a securing, ceremonial rhythm in life and it prevents them from breaking free from their cocoon, all the more because freedom can be so scaring and exhausting. ['When forgetting the rules of the game']"

"It is a great mystery to me how the problems of others seem like simple arithmetic while my own appear as complicated as a calculus equation."

"Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ['Not without the past']"

"If you babble enneagram, I am a five. If you boast myers-briggs, I am an introvert-intuition-thinking-perceiving."

"How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?"

"Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now."

"I feel like when I give trust that isn't earned, I receive hurt that isn't deserved."

"Boredom is a symptom of a conditioned and closed mind. If you are bored, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice. Open your mind, break-free from your conditioned routine, and reignite the flames of excitement and discovery."
Explore more quotes by David Sedaris

"Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan."

"The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely."

"I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it."

"I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won't stop crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason."

"When asked 'What do we need to learn this for?' any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness."

"If you are any kind of an artist, then validation can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway. Because you're just wired that way. It's so engrained, it's such a part of your personality that you don't just stop doing it."

"I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining, but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3, 1996,' I'll say to someone."

"But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn't even find work as an elf. That's when you know you're a failure."

"Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently and it was like, 'Yikes! What the hell happened?"

"I'd think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that's what cheap places do -- draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I'd found an affordable one it wouldn't have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques."
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