David Sedaris Quotes

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.

Every previous era looks innocent.

I would not like to live in the past because you don't get anesthetic when you go to the dentist. You don't get antibiotics. You don't get the things that you are used to now, cell phones and televisions and things that are very convenient. You don't want that. But, it would be fun if you could, every now and then, just meet a friend for lunch at Maxim's in Paris in 1900, or go back to 1870 just for a couple of hours, take a walk in the park, and then come right back to Broadway.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

Do you remember the time darlin' when everything made more sense in the world? Oh I remember, I remember... when life made more sense... Take me back, take me back, take me way back... to when life made more sense.

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

Now Momma's done away with the old black kettle she used to cook in when I was just littleAnd the door ain't sprung on her electric rangeThat little old farm and home we had it ain't there no more and that's too badFolks are doing away with the simple things.

You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don't feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

We can never go back.

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.

To look back into the past only makes sense if it serves the future.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

In a serious sense, wanting to change something from the past doesn't work for me - change something you don't enjoy now rather than regretting it later.

I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler world, for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility. But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was.