Elin Hilderbrand Quotes

I want to brush my teeth," she said.
Before she knew what was happening, Thatcher leaned over and kissed her. Very quickly, very softly. "You're fine," he said. "I detect a trace of vinaigrette, but it's really very pleasant." He held the flute out to her, and as it gave her something to do other than fall over backward, she accepted it.

She waved good-bye and hurried down the street towards her family's house, thinking again that some nights had good karma and some nights were cursed, and for a few moments, tonight had seemed like the former, but it had ended up the latter.

She had thought that 'depression' would be like sitting in a rocking chair and not being able to make it move. She had thought it would descend over her like a fog, turning things fuzzy, coloring them gray. But depression was active, it paced back and forth wringing its hands. She couldn't stop thinking; she couldn't find her way free from apprehension.

If everyone slept with the person he or she had secretly fallen in love with, the world would be chaos.

the mistress of ceremonies, in her

When you peered into the windows of someone else's life, you could only guess what was going on.

And here," she said. "Let me fix your tie." She tugged on his bow tie, her eyes appraising him, and he basked in it. He had left his tie crooked on purpose, just so she could straighten it.

collaborating with Grace. It was more

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches.

One is never too young for fine literature . . .

With this in mind, Ava tells herself to be present and celebrate the holiday instead of wishing it was over. After all, one is given only a certain number of Christmases in one's life.

However, deep down, Brenda suspected that it was the stolen nature of those two hours that transformed them. She was supposed to be somewhere else ... She had set aside those two hours - three, if you counted the driving - to be of service to her sister. The fact that Vicki had unexpectedly granted her leave gave those two hours a rarefied quality. What Brenda had thought was, I'd better not waste them. And, like magic, the words had come. The pages had filled.

To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, to be late is to be forgotten.

The body of water between Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket is the Muskeget Channel. "I

In the restaurant kitchen, August meant lobsters, blackberries, silver queen corn, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. In honor of the last year of the restaurant, Fiona was creating a different tomato special for each day of the month. The first of August (two hundred and fifty covers on the book, eleven reservation wait list) was a roasted yellow tomato soup. The second of August (two hundred and fifty covers, seven reservation wait list) was tomato pie with a Gruyère crust. On the third of August, Ernie Otemeyer came in with his wife to celebrate his birthday and since Ernie liked food that went with his Bud Light, Fiona made a Sicilian pizza- a thick, doughy crust, a layer of fresh buffalo mozzarella, topped with a voluptuous tomato-basil sauce. One morning when she was working the phone, Adrienne stepped into the kitchen hoping to get a few minutes with Mario, and she found Fiona taking a bite out of red ripe tomato like it was an apple. Fiona held the tomato out.
"I'd put this on the menu," she said. "But few would understand.

In the center, where the fruit bowl usually is, the cheesecake rests on a pedestal. It's beautiful- perfectly round and smoothed, creamy white with chocolate swirls on a chocolate cookie crust, sitting in a pool of something bright pink.
"You didn't make that," Phil challenges.
"Sure I did," Fiona says.
"What is it?" Jimmy asks.
"Chocolate swirl cheesecake with raspberry coulis." She holds up the June issue of Gourmet; the very same cake is pictured on the cover.

He'd learned that when you love someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy. (p. 419)

It's not a house to us. It's a home. And it's not a home, it's s way of life. Our summertime happens here. This house is part of our past, it's our present, it'll be our future. It's who we are.

She could hear the voices and laughter coming from the yard, and she thought, really, this was the best part of any wedding, not the ceremony or the cake or the dancing but the downtime when they were all together without the lights shining on them.

Some people think sugar is the key to desserts," Mario said. "But I am here to tell you that if you want a good dessert, you have to start with a fresh egg.

I'm going to kiss you if that's okay," he said.
"It won't be our first kiss," she said.
"No," he said. "I let one slip at the restaurant. I thought about apologizing to you for that, but I didn't feel sorry." And with that, he kissed her. One very soft, very sweet kiss. The kiss was fleeting but it left a big ache for more in its wake. Adrienne gasped, taking in the cool sea air, and then Thatcher kissed her again. Even softer, even shorter. The third time, he stayed. They were kissing. His mouth opened and Adrienne tasted his tongue, sweet and tangy like the lime in his drink. She felt like she was going to burst apart into eighty-two pieces of desire. Like the best lovers, Thatcher moved slowly- for right now, on the blanket, it was only about the kissing. Not since high school had kissing been this intense. It went on and on. They stopped to look at each other. Adrienne ran her fingertips over his pale eyebrows, she cupped his neck inside the collar of his shirt. He touched her ears and kissed the corners of her eyes, and Adrienne thought about how she had come right out with the truth about her mother at dinner and how unusual that was. And just as she began to worry that there was something different this time, something better, of a finer quality than the other relationships she had found herself in, she and Thatcher started kissing again, and the starting again was even sweeter.
Yes, Adrienne thought. Something was different this time.
How much time

He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being.

Being president of the United States is the most stressful, thankless job in the world and Margaret can't fathom why anyone would voluntarily pursue it.

Three geese stuffed with apples and onions, served with a Roquefort sauce, stuffing with chestnuts, potato gratin, curried carrots, brussel sprouts with bacon and chives-

They always stayed at the beach to enjoy the golden hour, that hour when the sun sank low enough to spangle the water and make everything look as if it had been dipped in honey.

Every life contains a novel.

June and July are foggy months. In the early summer on Nantucket, warm moist air flows over the colder water. The moist air cools to its dew point and a cloud forms at the water's surface. This is fog.

For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.

What I think is that every family is happy in their own fashion, and every family is unhappy in their own fashion. Every family is both functional and dysfunctional.

She knew she should be happy the girls were outside riding their very expensive horses. Girls who rode became interested in boys and makeup and cigarettes much later than their nonriding counterparts.

breath - the last thing

lighter now that it was summer. When he was a little boy, he always told her how pretty she was. Now,

And Margot should have made a rule about no cell phones. What was it about life now? The people who weren't present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.

Fear gripped her like hands around the neck, the way it could only happen in an unfamiliar room in the pitch black of night.

He liked the atmosphere of skiing - the fire-warmed lodge, the view of a snowy mountainside, the clean air, the drinks - but not the sport itself.

in the sweltering attic, and

But for now, the aioli. Garlic, egg yolks, a wee bit of Dijon mustard. In her Cuisinart she whipped these up to a brilliant, pungent yellow; then she added olive oil in a steady stream. Here was the magic of cooking- an emulsion formed, a rich, garlicky mayonnaise. Salt, pepper, the juice of half a lemon. Marguerite scooped the aioli into a bowl and covered it with plastic.
She barely made it through the marinade for the beef. Her forehead was burning; she felt hot and achy, dried up. She whisked together olive oil, red wine vinegar, sugar, horseradish, Dijon, salt, and pepper and poured it over the tenderloin in a shallow dish.

Iowa City is okay as Midwestern cities go, but there's no food, no culture, no ocean.

The moment their eyes meet, the moment their hands touch. That certainty. That recognition. You. You are the one. This is what it feels like. Nothing, as it turns out, can take the place of love.

All her life, Claire had had a problem figuring out where other people ended and she began. All her life, she'd taken on the world's hurt; she held herself responsible. But why?

It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised.

Of the things I want my daughters to know the greatest of these is love.

The special was a tomato salad with bacon, basil, and blue cheese. It was a work of art. Fiona had found a rainbow of heirloom tomatoes- red, orange, yellow, green, purple, yellow with green stripes- and she stacked them on the plate in a tower as colorful as children's blocks.

The charitable acts that count the most, Greer believes, are those done without anyone knowing.

Euthanasia is a topic that taps into deeply personal views of dignity and fear but, mostly, spirituality.

I want an ending when the woman is happy instead of good.

She gazes over at baby Genevieve, who is now asleep in Kevin's arms, and thinks, I really don't have any words of advice at all. The world is an endlessly confounding place.

A garden is not a matter of life or death. It is far more important than that.

She [Tate] wanted to swim but hadn't brought her suit. She considered jumping in her shorts and T-shirt – but she was determined, from this point forward, to act like a grown woman. Not a woman like Anita Fullin or like Chess or like her mother or like Aunt India – but like the woman that was inside herself.

Then she thought, the grown woman inside me is hot and sticky. And she jumped in.

Stuart and Jenna exchanged rings-platinum band for Stuart, and platinum with diamonds for Jenna, but they could have been aluminum or plastic. Expensive rings did not guarantee a happy life together.

And that's the thing about marriage. It can look perfect to people from the outside but be utterly imperfect on the inside. The reverse is true as well. No one knows what goes on in a marriage except for the two people living in it.

Hope had been in the NICU for a week before she was named. The name her parents had picked out was Allison - Allegra and Allison, for nauseating twin symmetry - but after all that transpired, they changed their minds and decided to call her Hope, no explanation needed. She was a survivor, an underdog who had prevailed;

Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher because they're still out there, haunting you with the what ifs.

When you're in love, every day is like a present you get to open.

The rod felt sleek and expensive in his hand; it was the Maserati of surf-casting rods.

I want my money back!

What happened when we died? How were we to know that death wasn't as profound an adventure as life was?

Love is scary! Taking a vow to love someone through sickness and health, for richer for poorer, forsaking all others, until death do us part, is the most terrifying experience a person can have. Why pretend any differently?

Summer does something to the brain, " Beth said. "It's intoxicating. Everything shimmers

She was a born liar, Hope thought. It was incredible. She should skip the modeling career and go straight to politics. "I

Even Meredith's attraction to Freddy had paled when compared to the real love of Meredith's life. The steady, unconditional, fortifying love of Meredith's father was gone forever.

Women clearly felt things more deeply: they read sub-text where men saw only white space.

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.