A Quote by Mary McCarthy

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

Mary McCarthy

Quote Topics

Cake Imaginary Plums Put Real Really Take Them

Quote Author

Mary McCarthy
American - Novelist
June 21, 1912 - October 25, 1989

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.

Mary McCarthy

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

Mary McCarthy

When I got to France I realized I didn't know very much about food at all. I'd never had a real cake. I'd had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn't have anything like that in it - it's all egg power.

Julia Child

An anthology is like all the plums and orange peel picked out of a cake.

Walter Raleigh

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.

Rebecca Solnit

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.

Paul Auster

Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents' Night.

Beverly Cleary

The imaginary expression ?(-a) and the negative expression -b, have this resemblance, that either of them occurring as the solution of a problem indicates some inconsistency or absurdity. As far as real meaning is concerned, both are imaginary, since 0 - a is as inconceivable as ?(-a).

Augustus De Morgan

Pie can't compete with cake. Put candles in a cake, it's a birthday cake. Put candles in a pie, someone's drunk in the kitchen.

Jim Gaffigan

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

Ron Ben-Israel

I would hate to be in high school now. Psychologists talk about the 'imaginary audience' that teens seem to feel they have around them and that makes them think they have to keep up their image all the time. Now with Facebook and MySpace and 24/7 online access, that imaginary audience has become real.

Alexandra Robbins

As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

Naomi Novik

One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?

Stephen Hawking

An umeboshi plum is a little Japensese salt plum. The best thing for motion sickness is to take one of these plums . . . and tape it to your belly button. I'm not kidding you. This really, really works.