Alice B. Toklas Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen.

Alice B. Toklas
Haven't you learned yet that it isn't age but lack of experience that makes us fall off ladders or have radiators fall on us.

Alice B. Toklas
I have just learned a delicious French usage. On wedding invitations when they say the mass is at noon they mean one o'clock — when they say at noon precise they mean half after twelve — and when they say at very precisely noon they mean noon.

Alice B. Toklas
It is as Gertrude used to say unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.

Alice B. Toklas
The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby — how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.

Alice B. Toklas
I hear Francis has presented you with a grandson. Isn't he wonderful — he thinks of everything.

Alice B. Toklas
Some time all kinds of letters will be published to the ineffable delight of endless readers.

Alice B. Toklas
As Gertrude always used to say as soon as you have disturbed someone you can find the missing object yourself.

Alice B. Toklas
Please do not send me a catalog. I am at the age now where I am destroying papers rather than gathering them.

Alice B. Toklas
To cook as the French do one must respect the quality and flavour of the ingredients. Exaggeration is not admissible. Flavours are not all amalgamative. These qualities are not purchasable but may be cultivated. The haute cuisine has arrived at the enviable state of reacting instinctively to these known principles.

Alice B. Toklas
Tomorrow an ex-G.I. is calling for me in an ex-Jeep to take Basket to the vet's — he has to have something done to what if he were a chicken would go over the fence last.

Alice B. Toklas
The French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz — it's just a national gift.

Alice B. Toklas
These [recipes] are very nice ways to cook string beans but they interfere with the poor vegetable's leading a life of its own.

Alice B. Toklas
In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.

Alice B. Toklas
Illness sets the mind free sometimes to roam and surmise.

Alice B. Toklas
Sex is perhaps like culture — a luxury that only becomes an art after generations of leisurely acquaintance. Why we scarcely approach either as individuals — it's mass propulsion still!

Alice B. Toklas