Nora Ephron Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

The state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read; but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I am truly beside myself.

Nora Ephron
The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? — has a kind of fun appeal.

Nora Ephron
You are the butter to my bread, you are the breath to my life.

Nora Ephron
I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.

Nora Ephron
I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity [Wellesley] stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word. How marvelous it would have been to go to a women's college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.

Nora Ephron
Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

Nora Ephron
I cannot understand any woman's wanting to be the first woman to do anything.... It is a devastating burden and I could not take it, could not be a pioneer, a Symbol of Something Greater.

Nora Ephron
Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to the shortage of men but otherwise not worth the trouble.

Nora Ephron
Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy.

Nora Ephron
I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.

Nora Ephron
I don't want to be someone that you're settling for. I don't want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn't it?

Nora Ephron
Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.

Nora Ephron
Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.

Nora Ephron
The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

Nora Ephron
Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.

Nora Ephron
When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

Nora Ephron
Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.... Reading is bliss.

Nora Ephron
Beware of men who cry. It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

Nora Ephron
There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.

Nora Ephron
The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was.

Nora Ephron
Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.

Nora Ephron
I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can't believe I'm here without her. - on losing her best friend

Nora Ephron
You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.

Nora Ephron
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Nora Ephron
The one thing I would like to get across about my whole feeling regarding high school is how I was when I was fifteen. Gawky. Always a hem hanging down, or strap loose, or a pimple on my chin. I never knew what to do with my hair. I was a mess. And I still carry that fifteen-year-old girl around now. A piece of me still believes I'm the girl nobody dances with.

Nora Ephron
Success comes and goes. Your flops stay with you for life.

Nora Ephron
When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.

Nora Ephron
The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Nora Ephron
Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home,... only to no home I'd ever known.... I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic.

Nora Ephron
I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage. I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70.

Nora Ephron