Sarah Vowell Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Sarah Vowell
Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Vowell
...the huge Jackson Pollock canvas that is the U.S.A.: vast, murky, splotched and slapped together by a drunk.

Sarah Vowell
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.

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

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

Sarah Vowell
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
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
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
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.

Sarah Vowell
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.

Sarah Vowell
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
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
I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.

Sarah Vowell
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
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.

Sarah Vowell
Frank Sinatra is the first punk... punk comes out of nowhere... punk is... a rumor that spreads... that guts and perseverence mean more than anything else...

Sarah Vowell
No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead - Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It's a mind-set of "Here I come to save the day" versus "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

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
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.

Sarah Vowell