Gabrielle Hamilton Quotes & Sayings

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother? — Gabrielle Hamilton

1 can sardines in oil Only Ruby Brand boneless and skinless - in oil - from Morocco 1 dollop Dijon mustard small handful cornichons small handful Triscuit crackers 1 parsley branch Buckle the can after you open it to make it easier to lift the sardines out of the oil without breaking them. Stack the sardines on the plate the same way they looked in the can - more or less. Don't crisscross or zigzag or otherwise make "restauranty." Commit to the full stem of parsley, not just the leaf. Chewing the stems freshens the breath. — Gabrielle Hamilton

So what is there to make of the simplistic thing I've come to utter in explanation, which is so drab, so monochromatic, so water on top of ice even though it's the most direct, most distilled path from my heart to my mouth: I feel better without her. — Gabrielle Hamilton

My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it's stupid to let money be the reason you don't do something. — Gabrielle Hamilton

My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I'm not afraid of the real truth. There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that is going to make me clutch my pearls. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with "allergies" to dairy and wheat - cheese and bread basically - but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed "allergies," I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could've strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy - some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread - and I would've liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters' fucked-up relationship with food. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Alone on the terrace looking up at the stars I would not feel lonely. With him glued to the screen, I feel gutted ... — Gabrielle Hamilton

[I] like to be anchored by routine, not shackled by it. — Gabrielle Hamilton

People who know me well understand fully what I am saying when I suggest that I am working an appetite and that we'd best be making our move. This means it is time to hit the road before my blood sugar-what's left of it-crashes to that point where I'm going to ruin your fucking day. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I was gazing at that full bushel of apples when she made her stunning, preposterous announcement, that I have possibly never recovered from. 'Jim it's over, and the kids and I have decided you should go. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Be careful what you get good at doin' 'cause you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life. -Jo Carson — Gabrielle Hamilton

That is my favorite kind of integrated person. Some of each thing and not too much of any one. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I had always wanted to contribute in some way. Leave a little more than I took. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Badass is a juvenile aspiration. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I was purely content to sit in the car and wander around my own mind. Watching the world itself, the people in it, and my whole internal life was more than enough to keep me entertained. — Gabrielle Hamilton

It became such a recurring experience during this period when I was twenty
to be starving and afraid of running out of money
as I wandered from Brussels to Burma and everywhere in between for months on end, that I later came to see it as a part of my training as a cook. I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and water, and so on. — Gabrielle Hamilton

You are always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Each housing development has a "country" name - Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle crossing, Deer Path, which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building. — Gabrielle Hamilton

For the first time in probably the entire decade that had passed since I had seen or spoken to my own mother, I thought warm and grateful thoughts about her. She instilled in us nothing but a total and unconditional pleasure in food and eating. — Gabrielle Hamilton

But it was from him - with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck) - from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. — Gabrielle Hamilton

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being
the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person
than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation. — Gabrielle Hamilton

As soon as I saw the three-bin stainless steel pot sink, exactly like ours, I felt instantly at home and fell into peeling potatoes and scraping plates for the dishwasher like it was my own skin. And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start. — Gabrielle Hamilton

This is the crepe.
This is the cider.
This is how we live and eat. — Gabrielle Hamilton

There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive and learn how to kill a chicken. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I knew that I did not want to go to that juvenile diversion program because I had an intuitive sense that it would turn me irrevocably into the kind of character that I was now only rehearsing to be. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck) - from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it. — Gabrielle Hamilton

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up ... then down ... then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It's a tired reading style. I'm sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves - as they've been arranged - could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faint hearted ness of most people-but I knew there were people in the world who remained friends, for life, with bunk mates from sleepaway camp, and this was that group of people. — Gabrielle Hamilton