Sarah vowell Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Sarah Vowell
Quotes of Author: Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell _ Radio On: A Listener's Diary
But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their own music, clothes, and point{s} of view. It's sad and fraudulent that the kind of wholesale worship of some historical way of life has settled over so many young people, infecting them like a noxious gas... I love the dead--grew up in the thrall of Shakespeare and Hank Williams and James Dean. And I adore the Rolling Stones. But there's a difference between cherishing "Satisfaction" and wearing Keith Richards' hair while doing Keith Richards' drugs. I don't want to be Keith Richards. I wanna be me. Not--like the neo-Deadheads--just another extra in an overblown costume drama about something that wasn't that interesting the first time around.
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Sarah Vowell _ The Best American Nonrequired
If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.
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Sarah Vowell _ The Best American Nonrequired
Has our enslavement to dopamine-to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak-made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety
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Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat
Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists' most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports, particularly luxury items. While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What's more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after
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Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat
Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that November Knox and his brother set off for New York. Who knew they would return in January with forty-three cannons, fourteen mortars, and two howitzers dragged across frozen rivers and over the snowy Berkshire Mountains on custom sleds. The 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.
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Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat
To establish such a forthright dream of decency, who wouldn't sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn't among them?
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Sarah Vowell _ The Best American Nonrequired
Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period-the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This led him to believe that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted in Nevada's Great Basin 200 million years ago. The New York Times took Knapp's finding somewhat seriously, as did Nobel Prize-winning Oxford scientist Frederick Soddy, who used it to support his pet theory of a superior race of prehistoric humans that destroyed itself after achieving scientific mastery over atomic energy.
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Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat
Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free?
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Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat
Congress was soon neck-deep in arrogant boobs whom Beaumarchais or Deane had promised high ranks and higher salaries. "Men cannot be engaged to quit their native country . . . in a cause which is not their own" is how Deane rationalized the incentives to Congress."
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Sarah Vowell _ Assassination Vacation
Lincoln, of course, was giggling at the moment of impact; Booth knowing the play Lincoln was watching by heart, chose a laugh Lin on purpose to dampen the noise of his Derringer's report.
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Sarah Vowell _ Assassination Vacation
But the first thing a present-day visitor notices is that it's exceedingly gay. A life-size, fully dressed Garfield stands on top of a giant shaft.
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Sarah Vowell _ Assassination Vacation
In the gravedigger scene in act V, Hamlet looks upon an anonymous skull and jokes that even Alexander the Great decomposed into dust that could have been used to plug a beer barrel. But when Hamlet is shown this skull of his old friend Yorick, the prince becomes unspeakably sentimental and sad because he knew him.
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