whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.
Interpretation
Transcribing moving passages helps one internalize the essence of excellence in writing.
In this quote, David Sedaris highlights the practice of writing down powerful passages that resonate with him. By doing so, he aims to absorb the qualities of excellent writing into his own craft, suggesting that engagement with great literature can inspire personal growth and improvement in oneβs own writing abilities.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a writing workshop to emphasize the importance of learning from great writing.
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.
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.
People ask me, 'Have you ever considered doing stand-up?' To me it would be less offensive if someone asked me, 'Have you ever considered dental implants?'
Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!
I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
When I am through learning, I am through.
Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.
It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.
By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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