Lake Wobegon Days Quotes

“Good old Norwegian cooking: you don’t read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality.”

“I suppose they would think it was funny. Naming a furnace after your parents. Not many people would do it I suppose. Why did you?”

“To be seen in such a place on the Lord’s Day - what had we done? My mother rose from her chair. ‘We can’t stay. I’m sorry,’ Dad told the waitress.”

“That’s how Mother told stories. Never enough detail, and she always left you hanging at the end.”

“In place of true contrition, you taught me to be apologetic. I apologize continually. I apologize for my own existence, a fact I can not change. For years, you told me I’d be sorry someday. I am.”

“Honor ‘AMERICA’ June 14 AT 4 p.m. Be proud of ‘Our Land & People’. Be part of the ‘LIVING FLAG’. Don’t let it be said that Lake Wobegon was ‘Too Busy’. Be on time. 4 p.m. ‘Sharp’.”

My dad held me up to look at her. ‘It’s like being asleep,’ he whispered, but she looked no more asleep than a piece of lumbar. She looked dead as a doornail.”

“On the way home, we sang with special enthusiasm, On top of old Smoky, two thousand feet tall, I shot my old teacher with a big booger ball. I shot her with glory, I shot her with pride. How could I miss her? She’s thirty feet wide.”

“A rotten Big Boy hitting the target is a memorable sound. Like a fat man doing a bellyflop, and followed by a whoop and a yell from the tomatoee.”

“Grow up, my sister said after she took a bite of Grape-Nuts that she had shaken salt on, knowing I had put sugar in the shaker, but actually I had switched it back so it really was salt in the shaker. Grow Up.”

“The file was marked: ‘Error - no such appears on map - must mean Albany.‘”

“You have fed me wretched food, vegetables boiled to extinction, fistfuls of white sugar, slabs of fat, mucousy casseroles made with globs of cream of mushroom, until it’s amazing my heart still beats. Food was not fuel but ballast; we ate and then we sank like rocks.”

“It’s hard to get people interested. You set off the fire alarm and they just get up and go to lunch.”

“He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.”

“He though about putting up a sign: CALM DOWN HE’S LIKE THAT TO EVERYBODY.”

“About six years ago, Lake Wobegon High decided to cut out commencement speeches by the valedictorian, salutatorian, and class orator because they all sounded the same. That was the year that Charlene Holm made valedictorian. Her family marched to school, and the manure hit the ventilator.”

“If we needed urgent help, why not get in Einar’s car and drive to the doctor’s? Einar always had his car when we went camping. That’s how we got there. Why stand around waving at a nonexistent troop on a hill that wasn’t high enough and probably misspelling words in the process (‘UNGENT/SEND HEAP/I’M BADLY CURT’) when we could hop into Einar’s Studebaker?”

“Just once I’d like Daryl to pick me first. ‘Him! I want him! The skinny kid with the glasses and the black shoes! You! Come on!’ But I’ve never been chose with any enthusiasm.”

“Exposure to the heat was killing me; August 12, 101: why? Dallas 98. Miami 96. You don’t have to be Einstein to see the unfairness of it.”

“If you lived today as if it were your last, you’d buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn’t you?”