Laurie Colwin Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies... instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.

Laurie Colwin
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.

Laurie Colwin
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.

Laurie Colwin
Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects.

Laurie Colwin
The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

Laurie Colwin
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.

Laurie Colwin
There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.

Laurie Colwin
For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.

Laurie Colwin
Life was a battle. You had to fight and think. You had to hack your way through life with your intelligence as a machete cutting down what obstacles you could. You were born knowing nothing; you had to fight for what you knew.

Laurie Colwin
Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

Laurie Colwin
When life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is not four perfect courses, each in a lovely pool of sauce whose ambrosial flavors are like nothing ever before tasted, but rather something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion - something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe.

Laurie Colwin
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.

Laurie Colwin
Dining alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

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

Laurie Colwin
One summer I spent some time in a farmhouse on the island of Minorca. This was my idea of bliss: a vacation at home (even if it wasn't my home).

Laurie Colwin
In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, 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.

Laurie Colwin
Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home.

Laurie Colwin
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.

Laurie Colwin
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.

Laurie Colwin
When Charlotte was around, he woke up as fast and clean as a freshly snapped twig. Now he crawled out of sleep, like a wounded fly climbing out of a sticky cup.

Laurie Colwin
The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction.

Laurie Colwin
Her eyes were so brown they appeared to have no pupils, giving her the smoldering look of a burning tire.

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

Laurie Colwin
The Lone Pilgrim sits at the dinner parties of others, partakes, savors, and goes home in a taxi alone.

Laurie Colwin
Holly conducted herself like a bird of paradise that had flown through the window of a house in Des Moines and settled down; she explained very little.

Laurie Colwin
I don't call it gossip, I call it 'emotional speculation.'

Laurie Colwin
In the days when my friends were happily traveling to Bolivia and Nepal, I was ashamed to admit that what I liked best was hanging around the house.

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

Laurie Colwin