Whenever I see a young woman boarding a plane in her pyjamas, or a guy in a T-shirt that reads your hole is my goal, I always wonder what Mom would t… - David Sedaris

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

You can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up a little sometimes, but you can't kill him.

"What's wrong?" he said. "I'll tell you what's wrong: you're killing us."
"But I thought that's what you wanted?"
"We did," my mother wept, "but not this way."
It hadn't occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life's work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.