Does anyone know this Sedaris quote?
An email I just received:
Hello,
I know this is really peculiar but I was writing to ask the source of a David Sedaris quote you had on your Twitter, I think? I was at an Ira Glass lecture a few months back and he played a Sedaris reading with the quote, “I love you, I love you, but I don’t know how to love you, It is a mantra we learn one day and use regularly for the rest of our lives…” toward the end of it. I’ve read and heard a lot of Sedaris’s work but had never come across that particular essay and the quote has been running through my mind ever since. I got fed up scanning through his books (and I can’t find my copy of his first book, anyway) so I googled it, and your page was the only thing that came up.Anyways, if you know what I’m talking about, that would be great, a huge moment of clarity, and quite the testament the internet as an information source.
Thanks,
Daniel Dreiberg
This is what I wrote back:
Hey Daniel,
The exact same thing happened to me. I went to see Ira Glass in Charlottesville VA and heard that quote and couldn’t get it out of my head. Unfortunately I think it was just one of his diary entries that he read on NPR before he was super famous and he never collected it anywhere. It’s a shame too, because though I remember the first part of the quote I couldn’t remember the entire thing. Do you remember it all?
–simon
I just came from hearing Ira Glass talk at Syracuse University, tried to google the same quotation, and this was all that came up. The best I can remember it right now is, “‘I love you, I love you, I love you, but I don’t know how to love you.’ After a certain age this becomes the story of your life.”