amelia

“As recently as fifty years ago my grandmother was picking cotton with bleeding fingers. I think about her all the time while I'm getting overpaid to sit at a computer, eat Chinese takeout, and think up things in my pajamas, The half century separating my fingers, which are moisturized with cucumber lotion and type eighty words per minute, and her bloody digits is an ordinary Land of Opportunity parable, and don't think I don't appreciate it. ”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“I talk about going to [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.”
― Sarah Vowell

“However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation