Sarah Vowell Quotations

It was such a great time for music. Being in college radio in the '80s, R.E.M. just happened, Elvis Costello was going strong. The biggest, most famous Seattle band was the Young Fresh Fellows. Our town was halfway between Seattle and Minneapolis on I-90, and so we got tons of shows just by virtue of being the gas-money stop on I-90.

Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.

But I have never had the privilege of unhappiness in Happy Valley. California is about the good life. So a bad life there seems so much worse than a bad life anywhere else. Quality is an obsession there—good food, good wine, good movies, music, weather, cars. Those sound like the right things to shoot for, but the never-ending quality quest is a lot of pressure when you’re uncertain and disorganized and, not least, broker than broke. Some afternoons a person just wants to rent Die Hard, close the curtains, and have Cheerios for lunch.

Radio is the playground of coincidence.

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.

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.

Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'?

When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.