Laurie Colwin > Quotes

“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

“To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.”
― Laurie Colwin

“The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.”
― Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.”
― Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim

“Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.”
― Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object

“For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.”
― Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“From Laurie Colwin: Lovely writing! About grief she writes: "I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.”
― Laurie Colwin

“she fought to keep the ugly, chaotic world at bay and to keep a sweet, pretty corner to live in.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“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, More Home Cooking

“To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.

I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Dinner 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, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.”
― Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over

“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

“I feel that weaving is a precise metaphor for the way in which life is made,” she said. “By which I mean individually constructed. Any strand can be woven in at the dictation of the imagination. I think of the philosophy of history as a loom of that sort. It is, isn’t it?”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“I’d like to go to all the knitting shops,” Doria said. “I want to see some rustic, hand-pulled yarn. I would also like to see some colonial fabrics, and, if possible, I would like to have some contact with a loom.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“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, Home Cooking

“How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications.”
― Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over

“Holly sat down, as if at home. But, Guido wondered, would she be happy where there were no trays?”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“Most of his time appeared to be spent bumming cigarettes from people whose annual income was about a fifth of his own.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“Their first actual kiss was a one-celled organism which, after they had been standing on the stairway kissing for some time, evolved into something rather grander--a bird of paradise, for example.”
― Laurie Colwin, Another Marvelous Thing

“I love the process of learning a thing. It’s doing a thing I find so boring.”
― Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness

“These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture -- a picture you did not have to paint yourself.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Her research revealed that knitting was a very popular indoor sport and that a loom was on permanent display at the Wool Institute, which also had a few samples of colonial fabric.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“Anxiety, she thought, was like a flock of birds on a telephone line. When people came around they flapped off, and when the people went away they hopped back on.”
― Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness

“Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.”
― Laurie Colwin

“Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Sam loved me in a way that was as close as love could come to his mother’s indifference. It was playful, bouncy, it accepted the situation between us without annotations, and without realizing it, he stuck me like a buffer between himself and his parents. He had a wife, and that warded them off. How could he be wild if he was settled? How could he be in trouble if he was married? He might have known these things, but coming from that emotionally monosyllabic household, how could he have had a vocabulary for them?”
― Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

“Unhappiness isn’t the worst thing in the world. It doesn’t last forever and it usually teaches you something about yourself.”
― Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness