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“Have a blessed day.�� This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,�� I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye�� or “thank-you,�� cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.�� This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!�� I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“The Romanians really do lead the world when it comes to cursing. “What have you got for me?�� I asked a woman from Transylvania who was now living in Vienna.
“Shove your hand up my ass and jerk off my shit,�� she offered.

I was stunned. “Anyone else would say, ‘Shove your hand up my ass,�� and then run out of imagination,�� I told her. “You people, though, you just keep going. And that’s what makes you the champions you are.�� Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to drive, I thought, watching as she walked out the door and onto the unsuspecting streets of Vienna, this poet, this queen, this glittering jewel in a city of flint.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“In France the most often used word is “connerie,�� which means “bullshit,�� and in America it’s hands-down “awesome,�� which has replaced “incredible,�� “good,�� and even “just OK.�� Pretty much everything that isn’t terrible is awesome in America now.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves. We’re not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. “I haven’t liked you since 2002,�� he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Why do you think she did it?�� I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking, since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us—us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, “This is boring.�� An hour later you could decide that it was the best thing you’d ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It's remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I'd been slammed into a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist-show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Do you think it was my fault that she drank?" my father asked not long ago. It's the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It's almost laughable, this insistence on a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Shopping has nothing to do with money. If you have it, you go to stores and galleries, and if not, you haunt flea markets or Goodwills. Never, though, do you not do it, choosing instead to visit a park or a temple or some cultural institution where they don’t sell things.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Later that night I met a Bulgarian. “In my country, you say to someone you hate, ‘May you build a house from your kidney stones.’�� Well, finally, I thought.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“I’d asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you’re more apt to bring a disease into it. “Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it’s normal to call them a cholera sufferer,�� a Dutch woman told me. “Either that or a cancer whore.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“We’re like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other’s hands and missing every time”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“A young couple strolls by, the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“I’d come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You’d think that if someone wanted a sex toy she’d go for the gold, sizewise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who had this person been hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I’d get hit by a car and killed. That’s just my luck. Medics would come and scrape me off the pavement, then, later, at the hospital, they’d rifle through my pack and record its contents: four garbage bags, some wet wipes, two flashlights, and a strap-on penis.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man’s stomach and shoulders look good.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Another word I’ve added to “the list�� is “conversation,�� as in “We need to have a national conversation about_________.�� This is employed by the left to mean “You need to listen to me use the word ‘diversity�� for an hour.�� The right employs obnoxious terms as well—“libtard,�� “snowflake,�� etc.—but because they can be applied to me personally it seems babyish to ban them. I’ve outlawed “meds,�� “bestie,�� “bucket list,�� “dysfunctional,�� “expat,�� “cab-sav,�� and the verb “do�� when used in a restaurant, as in “I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.�� “Ugh,�� Ronnie agrees. “Do!—that’s the worst.�� “My new thing,�� I told her, “is to look at the menu and say, ‘I’d like to purchase the veal chop.’�� A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. “My bad,�� for example, and “I’ve got your back�� and “You go, girlfriend.�� They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso