Gabrielle Hamilton Quotes

You are always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees.

Alone on the terrace looking up at the stars I would not feel lonely. With him glued to the screen, I feel gutted ...

I was gazing at that full bushel of apples when she made her stunning, preposterous announcement, that I have possibly never recovered from. 'Jim it's over, and the kids and I have decided you should go.

My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it's stupid to let money be the reason you don't do something.

I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faint hearted ness of most people-but I knew there were people in the world who remained friends, for life, with bunk mates from sleepaway camp, and this was that group of people.

I'm not afraid of the real truth. There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that is going to make me clutch my pearls.

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up ... then down ... then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It's a tired reading style. I'm sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves - as they've been arranged - could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name.

My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then.

Each housing development has a "country" name - Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle crossing, Deer Path, which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building.

Badass is a juvenile aspiration.

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline.

I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being
the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person
than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.

Be careful what you get good at doin' 'cause you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life. -Jo Carson

I was purely content to sit in the car and wander around my own mind. Watching the world itself, the people in it, and my whole internal life was more than enough to keep me entertained.

I had always wanted to contribute in some way. Leave a little more than I took.

I knew that I did not want to go to that juvenile diversion program because I had an intuitive sense that it would turn me irrevocably into the kind of character that I was now only rehearsing to be.

[I] like to be anchored by routine, not shackled by it.

Unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck) - from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

It became such a recurring experience during this period when I was twenty
to be starving and afraid of running out of money
as I wandered from Brussels to Burma and everywhere in between for months on end, that I later came to see it as a part of my training as a cook. I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and water, and so on.

So what is there to make of the simplistic thing I've come to utter in explanation, which is so drab, so monochromatic, so water on top of ice even though it's the most direct, most distilled path from my heart to my mouth: I feel better without her.