Kate Christensen Quotes

After my experiences with the 5:2 diet, I wasn't interested in a short-term fix that would fail later. I wanted a way of eating that made me lose weight without feeling deprived. ~ Kate Christensen

Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle. ~ Kate Christensen

Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me. ~ Kate Christensen

Loser lit antiheroes aren't well intentioned or earnest; they don't care whether you like them or not. They're self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism. ~ Kate Christensen

I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast. ~ Kate Christensen

Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days. ~ Kate Christensen

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing. ~ Kate Christensen

I have always felt loneliest in the presence of other people. People I can't connect with. People I feel unseen by. People who make me feel insincere or uncomfortable. For me, loneliness comes from a sense of missing something. I never miss anything when I'm alone. ~ Kate Christensen

David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk. ~ Kate Christensen

To taste fully is to live fully. And to live fully is to be awake and responsive to complexities and truths
good and terrible, overwhelming and miniscule. To eat passionately is to allow the world in; there can be no hiding or sublimation when you're chewing a mouthful of food so good it makes you swoon. ~ Kate Christensen

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes. ~ Kate Christensen

Now that I'm 50 and respectably settled in New England and markedly happier and more contented than I was in my youth, I modestly hope there's time to realize some of my youthful goals before I croak, but I'll take what I can get. ~ Kate Christensen

If I fell into one relationship after another with men who were either emotionally tuned out and unavailable or hotheaded and controlling, or both, it was because I was lacking in good sense about men. ~ Kate Christensen

I remember the moment I first became aware of aging. I was 30. I looked down at my knees, and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, 'And so it begins!' ~ Kate Christensen

After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths. ~ Kate Christensen

I have observed, through many years of living in north Brooklyn, that people, for example an ostensible group of friends, can be dangerous to one another. ~ Kate Christensen

In the case of the cashew, someone, somewhere, a long time ago determined that it had to be roasted. The cashew was once nicknamed the blister nut, because if you try to eat it raw from the tree, your mouth pays the price. The cashew is not a nut, however; it's a seed. ~ Kate Christensen

I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon. ~ Kate Christensen

In 1990, when I had just arrived in New York City as a wet-behind-the-ears 20-something girl from Arizona, I spent a year or more working as the personal secretary and secret ghostwriter to an American-born countess in her apartment on the Upper East Side. ~ Kate Christensen

Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it's important to wait, because once it's picked, it can't ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous. ~ Kate Christensen

The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration? ~ Kate Christensen

My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending. ~ Kate Christensen

I'd thought I had recovered for good from that sadness, but as I felt my marriage disintegrate, the memory of my raw yearning for babies and my husband's refusal to have them with me came back to me as part of the reason I was now leaving him. It felt like the heart of why I was so lonely with him. ~ Kate Christensen

If there's a rift in the marriage - if someone feels neglected, frustrated, tempted by others, or unsure - then trouble can easily arise. ~ Kate Christensen

Blogging is different from both journal-writing and writing for print. It's more fun than either of those. The freedom to write whatever I want and the unmediated connection with readers are the payoff. ~ Kate Christensen

I've never been an outward rebel, but inside, I just rebel deeply. ~ Kate Christensen

Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off. ~ Kate Christensen

Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike, stalky vegetable. ~ Kate Christensen

I left New York in 2009 when I fell in love with someone who had a farmhouse in New Hampshire ... Portland, Maine, felt like the inevitable place for us. ~ Kate Christensen

Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn't have to make conversation. ~ Kate Christensen

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself. ~ Kate Christensen

I've always had rock star envy. Unfortunately, writing is a pedestrian, tame occupation done while sitting in coffee-stained pajamas in front of a computer rather than prowling around a huge stage in sweaty leather pants, so I have to get my kicks vicariously. ~ Kate Christensen

I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this. ~ Kate Christensen

I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly. ~ Kate Christensen

So many of my memories are generated by and organized around food: what I ate, what people cooked, what I cooked, what I ordered in a restaurant. My mental palate is also inextricably intertwined with the verbal part of my brain. Food, words, memories all twist together, so it was the obvious way to structure my life. Each memory of food opened up an entire scene for me, it was the key that unlocked everything. ~ Kate Christensen

Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn't figure in European history until 1493. ~ Kate Christensen

I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry. ~ Kate Christensen

A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin. ~ Kate Christensen

Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky. ~ Kate Christensen

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky. ~ Kate Christensen

I wanted to capture time through how food and I were getting along at any given moment. That necessitated writing some dark stuff, some sad stuff, and a lot of painful memories, because my life has often been dark, sad, and painful. I didn't want to sugarcoat anything. ~ Kate Christensen

Famously cancer fighting, laden with vitamins, minerals, soluble fiber, and phytonutrients, broccoli and its relatives are among the healthiest ingredients of the human diet. ~ Kate Christensen

Reminded of what a diet really is, I began eating more slowly, being more conscious of when I was full. I started to enjoy my buckwheat bread with goat cheese and pureed butternut-squash soup as a response to real hunger. ~ Kate Christensen

Iggy Pop has a voice that's somehow simultaneously self-mocking, wild, precise, amused, righteous, cool, contained and bold. I don't know how he does what he does. ~ Kate Christensen

The pressure to be thin, which causes guilt and obsessiveness around food, is terrible and starts so early. For me, it started at sixteen when I left home and gained weight for the first time and was told by a slightly older boy, out of the blue, that I was "too plump." The shock of that lasted a good long time. ~ Kate Christensen

It's hard for me to generalize about kids and divorce. I think every family's experience is different; some kids are devastated by it, others relieved, and so forth, no matter what generation they're from. ~ Kate Christensen

There's almost nothing you can't do with a cashew. Not only does it lend its nutty sweetness to savory dishes, it also gives desserts a deep richness. ~ Kate Christensen

Odalisque, prompting us to call him Dingolion and Dandelingo ~ Kate Christensen

...that old unfulfilled craving became an obsession I couldn't escape, a black hole of raw grief I kept falling deeper into. 'Where are my children?' I felt their absence and loss as if they existed somewhere I couldn't reach, as if they were stuck forever on the other side of a membrane and I could never access them. ~ Kate Christensen

Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down. ~ Kate Christensen

Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power. ~ Kate Christensen

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food. ~ Kate Christensen

For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on. ~ Kate Christensen

I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies. ~ Kate Christensen

On Halloween, kids get to assume, for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they're also allowed to take candy from strangers - the scariest thing of all. ~ Kate Christensen

There are two kinds of ham: raw and cooked. Raw ham is cured with salt and/or smoke over time; cooked ham is boiled. Every culture that makes ham has its own unique and various methods. ~ Kate Christensen

In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless. ~ Kate Christensen

I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted. ~ Kate Christensen

To eat passionately is to allow the world in. ~ Kate Christensen

Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas. ~ Kate Christensen

Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven't developed or haven't expressed. ~ Kate Christensen

My blog is a celebration of the unexpected, settled, happy life I find myself living in Portland, Maine, at the ripe old age of fifty with someone I deeply love and am very happy with. That's part of why I started the blog. ~ Kate Christensen

I don't feel that I've had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional. ~ Kate Christensen

It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It's nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out. ~ Kate Christensen

If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal. ~ Kate Christensen

To taste fully is to live fully. ~ Kate Christensen

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book. ~ Kate Christensen

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays. ~ Kate Christensen

Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!) ~ Kate Christensen

There's a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour. ~ Kate Christensen

I wrote my first story when I was six or seven. ~ Kate Christensen

My youngest sister belonged to a group called the Twelve Tribes for many years. She recently left, with her husband and four children. Talking to her about her experiences in the group is fascinating, moving, and enlightening. ~ Kate Christensen

I've always written about adultery because it raises the question of transgression and trouble. ~ Kate Christensen

I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages. ~ Kate Christensen

Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I am excited to write about the real world, to stay in it. Fiction is an escape, a parallel life, and it was a powerful source of comfort for me when my own life was raw and uncomfortable. I don't feel the burning need to disappear into a fictional character these days. ~ Kate Christensen

It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known? ~ Kate Christensen

My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind. ~ Kate Christensen

Starting the blog was a way for me to generate this nonfiction first-person voice naturally, gradually, without feeling performance anxiety. It felt a bit like keeping journals when I was younger, but connecting to an instant readership without having to wait for publication made it also immediately satisfying. ~ Kate Christensen

My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been. ~ Kate Christensen

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin. ~ Kate Christensen

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing. ~ Kate Christensen

'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject. ~ Kate Christensen

In literature, older women are not often given center stage. ~ Kate Christensen

It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this. ~ Kate Christensen

Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female. ~ Kate Christensen

The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat. ~ Kate Christensen

When you're sixteen and struggling to forge an identity out of a morass of hormones and daydreams, remarks like that cut a deep groove in the brain. I trace the ongoing, victorious-feeling semi-starvation of my twenties directly back to adolescence - as a way of showing those assholes that I could control my appetites ... Which is so sad, in retrospect, because of course no one cared. ~ Kate Christensen

Optimizing return on capital will generate less growth than optimizing return on education. ~ Clayton Christensen

Kate?" "Yes?" I managed. "It's me, Julie. Are you dying?" I could tell she desperately wanted a different answer. "I love you." The expression on her face twisted something inside me. I looked from her to Curran. "I love you so much. Both . . ." "You can't die." She grabbed my hand. Tears swelled in her eyes. "You're all I have. Kate, please. Please don't die." My ~ Ilona Andrews

I know the true meaning of getting by by the skin of my teeth; I do. It doesn't matter whether you've got money or you haven't, whether you're famous or not. This is the case for all women, actually; you have to carry on. You always have to carry on. And you can, because you have to. ~ Kate Winslet

I cook a lot. I'm always experimenting. I'm not much of a recipe follower. ~ Erika Christensen

What does she want to be? A green girl doesn't like to consider this question. She is waiting around to be discovered just for being herself. ~ Kate Zambreno

Would he find her?
Without question.
Would he save her?
Always. ~ Lauren Kate

Sure, I could have lots of people who do the cooking, the driving, all that jazz - but I would be unhappy. I wouldn't want my children raised that way. ~ Kate Winslet

In New York, you can just wake up and everything sorts itself out. I love that, not having a plan. ~ Kate Mara

There's no way back,
There is no track
That leads to his past lives.
He sets himself on forwards.
And he loves.
And he survives. ~ Kate Tempest

Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing. ~ Kate Atkinson

When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am ... afraid ... we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is ... frightening, having to be me. ~ Kate Griffin

I have often observed that the state of motherhood can turn quite ordinary females into heroines . . . ~ Kate Saunders

I doubt if Dickens did, especially his women-his pretty women-Mrs. Dombey, Florence, Dora, Agnes, Ruth Pinch, Kate Nickleby, little Emily-we know them all through Hablot Browne alone-and none of them present any very marked physical characteristics. They are sweet and graceful, neither tall nor short; they have a pretty droop in their shoulders, and are very ladylike; sometimes they wear ringlets, sometimes not, and each would do very easily for the other. ~ George Du Maurier