Quote

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.

Sarah Vowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sarah Vowell
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 27
Actor
Author
Journalist
Voice Actor
Writer
Muskogee
Oklahoma
Sarah Jane Vowell
Louis
Figure
Figures
Point
Thought
Whole
Trying
Really
Armstrong

More quotes by Sarah Vowell

Image
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
Image
There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one of the most thrilling phrases in the English language: 'It was on this spot…' My fantasy is to one day become a docent.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.
Sarah Vowell
Image
But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.
Sarah Vowell
Image
History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Sarah Vowell
Image
Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called “the coolest Osmond.
Sarah Vowell
Image
Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
Sarah Vowell
Image
I'm not really the scented envelope kid of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffy-lite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.
Sarah Vowell
Image
I'm always disappointed when I see the word 'Puritan' tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to Hell.
Sarah Vowell
Image
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
Image
My audience is going to die before I do.
Sarah Vowell
Image
In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Sarah Vowell
Image
In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.
Sarah Vowell
Image
I haven't decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven't made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Conventions is the day a person gives up on the human race.
Sarah Vowell
Image
Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
Sarah Vowell
Image
After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us.
Sarah Vowell