David Sedaris

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.

If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, "Hello." This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians.Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.

I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it.

My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.

Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to.

The things I've bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

Low ceiling, stone walls, a dirt floor stamped with paw prints. I never go in without announcing myself. 'Hyaa!' I yell. 'Hyaa. Hyaa!' It's the sound my father makes when entering his toolshed, the cry of cowboys as they round up dogies, and it suggests a certain degree of authority. Snakes, bats, weasels --it's time to head up and move on out.

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn't conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way.

It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America.

If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.

Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.

I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I__ comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn__ real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they__e invaded the movies. I__ not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion _ that__ good technology. I__ talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They__e become like horses in a western _ they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.