J. Ryan Stradal Quotes

Well, the vast majority of people don't steal to get ahead. A lot of people work their way up from nothing without stealing."

"I don't think a lot of people work their way up from nothing, ever. People like you want to believe it happens all the time. But it really doesn't.

Also, what kind of baked good judging panel had three men on it? One was fine, but three? This was obviously a P.C. correction to last year's six female judges.

Her mother had told her once that the nicest thing you can do for someone is be happy to see them, and Helen thought about that now, as she felt herself smile involuntarily.

Her mother told her once that the nicest thing you can do for someone is be happy to see them,

Why? So you can still qualify for assistance? Your family is gaming the system?"

"No." Diana had always hated when people said this about her family. The bosses who made her dad list a payroll company as his employer, they gamed the system. The assholes who convinced her parents to take out both a second mortgage and a HELOC in 2006 gamed the system. The employers who would never give Edith enough hours for benefits gamed the system. But ask a lot of people, and they'd tell you it's people like her grandma who game the system. They'd tell you that an old woman who's worked hard every day of her life and still struggles to get by is a malignant vacuum for their personal tax dollars, and a blight on their lives as free Americans. "We're just trying to live.

His love for her made her feel like she was wearing sunglasses even when she wasn't.

...have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die.

But Octavia was a nice person with a big, generous heart who felt sorry for outsiders and tried to help them. And people like her never get any thanks for their selflessness. They are not the ones with the hardness to make others wait; they are the ones left waiting, until their souls are broken like old pieces of bread and scattered in the snow for the birds. They can go right ahead and aspire to the stars, but the only chance they'll ever have to fly is in a thousand pieces, melting in the hot guts of something predatory.

It made hot girls forget you were a dork, which is the point of all music.

hadn't grown into being a woman, she had become a woman with an exclamation mark, the sort of hardy feminine brute of the Pleistocene from which all women, great and frail, are descended.

Yes, the dish was flawless, and the wine pairing was supernatural, but these people were out of control. Were they trying to emotionally justify the meal's price tag? Did they have too many cocktails in the drinks tent? It was a breathtaking meal, one of the best that Cindy had ever had, but the hysteria around her was making her brain red.

already thinking about the good and the bad and the deep human necessity of it all, and how anybody ever got anything done without family, and how someone could give that up in the amount of time it takes to seal an envelope, with the same saliva once used to seal a marriage.

Eva knew that her mom hadn't gotten the vegan sorbet because it was too expensive. In their home, cost was the main reason why something good didn't happen.

Still, he had been a charismatic, talented scoundrel who almost certainly was on to a new woman after a week in Japan; there was nothing to long for or feel sorry for.

What an honor to live in a part of the world that loves good old-fashioned baking.

was like being told you can run free one day - in June several years from now - but during every second of the intervening time, you'll be getting run over by the world's slowest steamroller, and every day it cracks a bone, and recracks it, and recracks it, and when you're eighteen all you're going to have is a body full of dust, lifted and carried into the future like a flag loose from its mast.

wavering. She was not raised to confront people or defend herself in a confrontation; she was raised to appease, to mollify, to calm, to tuck little monsters in at night, to apologize for things she screwed up without realizing, to forgive, to sweeten, and her bars, her bars did that for the world, they were her I'm Sorry, they were her Like Me, they were her Love Freely Given.

Yes, he just wanted her to want to be a mom, in the same way that he felt, with all of his blood, that he was a dad first, and everything else in the world an obscure, unfathomably distant second.

With a dog, it's almost like having a kid." "No, it's not like having a kid," she said. "It's preferable in every possible way. That makes it like having a dog.

And she would pray for guidance, but she wouldn't ask the Lord forgiveness for swearing at her husband. That was gonna stand for now.

God made her a giving person, and even in this house of people who could be so hateful and hard, her one skill, she knew, was to serve them and make them happy, the way even an unwatered tree still provides whatever shade it can.

They were generous in the way of people running a garage sale who give things away to the folks who come at the end.

When it came to Eva's life, her mom had the awareness of a fifty-cent guppy; there were sad-eyed janitors at school who seemed to have more insight into Eva's heart than her own parents did.

After decades away from the Midwest, she'd forgotten that bewildering generosity was a common regional tic.

She's told me that even though you won't meet her tonight, she's telling you her life story through the ingredients in this meal, and although you won't shake her hand, you've shared her heart. Now please, continue eating and drinking, and thank you again.

When Lars first held her, his heart melted over her like butter on warm bread, and he would never get it back. When mother and baby were asleep in the hospital room, he went out to the parking lot, sat in his Dodge Omni, and cried like a man who had never wanted anything in his life until now.

He couldn't help it - he was in love by the time she left the kitchen - but love made him feel sad and doomed, as usual. What he didn't know was that she'd suffered through a decade of cool, commitment-phobic men, and Lars's kindness, but mostly his effusive, overt enthusiasm for her, was at that time exactly what she wanted in a partner.

if one day, that woman would seek her out, and for whatever balance of time, Cindy would have a daughter again. For now, she would return to her kitchen, wash the plate, the cup, and the fork, and just live in the world she had created, the world where the two of them existed, and nothing more.

As the eastbound flight reached cruising altitude, Cindy opened the latest issue of the Economist - she saved her smarter reading for public situations - when

...but she wouldn't leave the legacy she desired simply through prideful public displays, like some men did. There were advantages to a low profile. It was like a man to scratch his name on the banister of history, but Helen had come to believe that it was better to be the stairs.

Money allows people to survive their mistakes, she knew from having observed that phenomenon from a distance, and people like her were fucked.

Have you been in a canoe?" "Anywhere where two people can fit, they can have sex. It's the law.

Girls were lucky, they didn't have to have a thing. They just had to look nice and come to your shows and not call you all the time about stupid stuff.

She suddenly felt sorry for these people, for perverting the food of their childhood, the food of their mothers and grandmothers, and rejecting its unconditional love in favor of what? What? Pat did not understand.

It all looks the same in the toilet the next morning...

Her mom carefully selected her memories to reflect her established opinions, and it turned her mind into a bowl of lettuce she believed was a salad.

Maureen O'Brien's Bakery Lingo: A Partial Glossary
• 9 donuts - A shutout
• 2 croissants - A full moon
• 3 croissants - A ménage à trois
• 4 bear claws - Full smokey
• 2 bear claws - Half smokey
• The last one of any item - The gift of the Magi
• A baker's dozen of doughnut holes - a PG-13
• Anything in the unlikely quantity of 36 or a lot of something - A Wu-Tang
• Blueberry muffin - Chubby Checker
• Bran muffin - Warren G the regulator
• Any customer who left no tip - A libertarian
• Any customer who only tipped the coins from their change - A couch shaker
• Any person who requested a substitution - Master and demander
• Any person who requested TWO substitutions - Demander in chief
• Any person who requested MORE than two substitutions - The new executive chef

and finally....

• Any vegan customer - A Morrissey