Peg Bracken Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

Cheese for dessert is rather like Paradise Lost in that everyone thinks he ought to like it, but still you don't notice too many people actually curling up with it.

Peg Bracken
Like a chastity belt, the package tour keeps you out of mischief but a bit restive for wondering what you missed.

Peg Bracken
On their return from a trip, it is wise to see friends promptly, before they've had time to get their pictures developed.

Peg Bracken
It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English.

Peg Bracken
People will admit to arson and mayhem sooner than no sense of humor.

Peg Bracken
When people say it's a funny thing about them, you will probably be able to control your hysterics. They are only getting ready to announce the shattering fact that they don't like something. And it's not going to be something that's really quite awful, like suttee or apartheid; it's going to be something small.

Peg Bracken
Parents embarrass their children probably more than the other way around. I don't know why we should blush so hard for our parents — we didn't rear them — and yet we do.

Peg Bracken
But let me say this about learning experiences: they're weird. Or put it this way: what you learn from a learning experience is generally something else.

Peg Bracken
If the author is so interested in Science, why doesn't she take a course in it?

Peg Bracken
Kitchens were different then, too — not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different from a frozen pie thawing.

Peg Bracken
When you're little, time stretches obligingly, and vacation is forever.

Peg Bracken
The McKinleyville First Presbyterian had turned into a mortuary, and my first thought was, How could they tell?

Peg Bracken
Some women, it is said, like to cook.This book is not for them.This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.

Peg Bracken
There was something immensely comforting, I found, about a crumpet — so comforting that I've never forgotten about them and have even learned to make them myself against those times when I have no other source of supply.

Peg Bracken
Of pepper:
Always be sure it's coarse-ground, because a lot of people feel that anything that's peppered should look as though it had been fished out of a gravel pit.

Peg Bracken
Peas went with carrots as infallibly as ham went with eggs. For years I thought carrots and peas grew on the same vine.

Peg Bracken
Even small quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal.

Peg Bracken
'Let's eat out.' Those are the three little words every woman wants to hear.

Peg Bracken
On how to cook Skid Road Stroganoff:
Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

Peg Bracken
A fellow had to chase you till you caught him. Everyone knew that.

Peg Bracken
'It's like anything else,' Mrs. Moone said, largely. She said it quite often, I noticed, one of those fat, loose remarks that seem to settle down over everything, like a collapsing tent.

Peg Bracken
Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies.
My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they needn't listen.

Peg Bracken
It isn't true, by the way, that nothing is as bad as you think it's going to be. Some things are exactly as bad as you thought they were going to be, and some things are worse.

Peg Bracken
A celebrity is someone who no longer does the things that made him a celebrity.

Peg Bracken
The most all-around, practical, long-wearing illusions are the ones that you weave yourself.

Peg Bracken
You're not supposed to cuss when you're an old lady, and just when there's so much more to cuss about.

Peg Bracken
The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be.

Peg Bracken
My standard position in regard to cooking is on the sofa with my feet up.

Peg Bracken
One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church.

Peg Bracken
Many people choose, early on, their own truths from the large smorgasbord available. And once they've chosen them, for good reason or no reason, they then proceed rather selectively, wisely gathering whatever will bolster them or at least carry out the color scheme.

Peg Bracken