Sarah Vowell Quotes (36 Quotes)


    In my real life I'm more of a walking Woody Allen movie. I'm afraid to drive and I can't swim and all that stuff so it is incredibly thrilling and fun to listen to my voice do things that, when it's in my regular body, it would never get to do.

    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.

    In Shooting Dad, ... There were years and years when he hid out by himself in the garage making rifle barrels and I holed up in my room reading Allen Ginsberg poems, and we were incapable of having a conversation that didn't end in an argument.

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

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


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

    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.

    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.

    The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War-when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.

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

    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.

    I'm still definitely a journalist, so I work fast. And only with a gun to my head.

    I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms.

    So much of broadcasting hasn't really noticed that Watergate happened, that no one takes the voice of authority seriously anymore.

    We go in to liberate Cuba, but Cuba still isn't free; we don't really think through what we'll do after the initial treaty is signed, but we're still occupying. There's chaos and torture and finally an outcry.

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

    The basic reaction from students is relief that they're made to read something that isn't totally dull, uppity or dreary, ... They think my writing is vaguely entertaining, which I guess a lot of their homework isn't. As Ira says, when people say This American Life is the 'coolest show on public radio' is like being called the 'coolest Osmond.' It doesn't mean that much when you're the most entertaining homework.

    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.

    Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

    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.

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

    While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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

    I make my living half as a critic, so I think that opinionated would be a good thing for a critic to be. And I think crankiness has some sort of connotation of individualism,


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

    Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

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

    Once a woman spilled a drink on me in an elevator, ... She was dancing and holding a mango margarita and she dumped it on me and tried to dab me with napkins. I said, 'Don't touch me' and she recognized my voice from This American Life .

    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.

    What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.

    It was such a great time for music. Being in college radio in the '80s, R.E.M. just happened, Elvis Costello was going strong. The biggest, most famous Seattle band was the Young Fresh Fellows. Our town was halfway between Seattle and Minneapolis on I-90, and so we got tons of shows just by virtue of being the gas-money stop on I-90.

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

    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.

    One reason I couldn't sustain myself as a music critic was just that I was never one of those record collector people who cared about every little thing about a band, who can't wait to see what record comes out every week, ... For me, it was always more obsessive. I could listen to the same Jonathan Richman song over and over again. I came at it as a fan, but not a 'follow the beat' kind of fan. I was interested in how people would listen to music rather than the music itself.

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


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