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

Sarah Vowell

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Sarah Vowell
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 27
Actor
Author
Journalist
Voice Actor
Writer
Muskogee
Oklahoma
Sarah Jane Vowell
Earth
America
Best
Canada
Worse
Lasts
Last
Hope

More quotes by Sarah Vowell

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.
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I talk about going to his [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water... the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.
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Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
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My audience is going to die before I do.
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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.
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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.
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You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
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There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
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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.
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You know, it's always good to have a synonym just for variety.
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When one of a culture's guiding credos is that all men are created equal, any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.
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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.
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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.
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What are you hiding? No one ever asks that.
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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.
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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