Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Ruth Reichl - Page 2

I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.

When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.

I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.

I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.

What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.

Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.

What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do.

I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.

The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.

My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.

If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.

Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.

In really good times, you say, 'No, I'm not taking that ad.' But in bad times, you'll take anything.

I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.

I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.

I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

Hunger, I discovered, is very much a matter of the mind, and as I began to study my own appetites, I saw that my teenage craving had not really been for food. That ravenous desire had been a yearning for love, attention, appreciation. Food had merely been my substitute.

Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.

Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.

I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.

I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.

I like poached eggs, but I'll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.

It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.

I don't have my own garden; we're on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.

If you're going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff.

Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.

If you start with a great peach, there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.

I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.

You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.

The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.

If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.

One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.

It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.

...it was so rich and exotic I was seduced into taking one bite and then another as I tried to chase the flavors back to their source.

A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife.

The strands of spaghetti were vital, almost alive in my mouth, and the olive oil was singing with flavor. It was hard to imagine that four simple ingredients [olive oil, pasta, garlic and cheese] could marry so perfectly.

I felt that I was really living in the moment. I did not know where my life was going, but right now the future did not trouble me.

She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.

Plain fresh bread, its crust shatteringly crisp. Sweet cold butter. There is magic in the way they come together in your mouth to make a single perfect bite.

Growing up, I was utterly oblivious to the fact that Mom was teaching me all that. But I was instantly aware of her final lesson, which was hidden in her notes and leters. As I read them I began to understand that in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, Mom showed me that it is never too late to find out how to do it.

...in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, ...it is never too late to find out how to do it.

I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.

When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.

Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.

The single most useful ingredient on the planet. In a pinch you can scramble them and call it dinner. But it only takes five eggs, a little milk and a handful of cheese to make a fat, sassy cheese soufflé.

Anyone who thinks they're too grown up or too sophisticated to eat caramel corn, is not invited to my house for dinner

Life is so endlessly delicious

When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.