Laurie Colwin Quotes

I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in.

I come from a coffee-loving family, and you can always tell when my sister and I have been around, because both of us collect all the dead coffee from everyone's morning cup, pour it over ice, and drink it. This is a disgusting habit.

She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities
this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny.

As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical.

On Saturday mornings I would walk to the Flavor Cup or Puerto Rico Importing coffee store to get my coffee. Often it was freshly roasted and the beans were still warm. Coffee was my nectar and my ambrosia: I was very careful about it. I decanted my beans into glass ... and I ground them in little batches in my grinder.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life.

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.

He was the soul of kindness and concern. The fact that he had talked to my father about this made me want to stab him. But I only said, "I'll talk to Patrick. This doesn't sit right with me.

It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.

At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.

Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal,

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.
I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was.

To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people.

I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook.

It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else.

Holly sat down, as if at home. But, Guido wondered, would she be happy where there were no trays?

Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.

Most of his time appeared to be spent bumming cigarettes from people whose annual income was about a fifth of his own.

Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed.

Somehow or other, I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd.

You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture
a picture you did not have to paint yourself.

I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.

Their first actual kiss was a one-celled organism which, after they had been standing on the stairway kissing for some time, evolved into something rather grander
a bird of paradise, for example.

When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge.

It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.

There is really a je ne sais quoi about turkey cooking - the air of festivity, the family squabbles, the constant basting - that does not apply to the turkey breast, which is, really, a convenience of food ... A turkey without seasonal angst is like a baseball game without a national anthem, a winter without snow, a birthday party without candles.

Lentils are friendly - the Miss Congeniality of the bean world.

From Laurie Colwin: Lovely writing! About grief she writes: I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.

To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.

Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living.

It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Sam loved me in a way that was as close as love could come to his mother's indifference. It was playful, bouncy, it accepted the situation between us without annotations, and without realizing it, he stuck me like a buffer between himself and his parents. He had a wife, and that warded them off. How could he be wild if he was settled? How could he be in trouble if he was married? He might have known these things, but coming from that emotionally monosyllabic household, how could he have had a vocabulary for them?

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.

The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people.

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato.