Julie Powell Quotes & Sayings

It was 10:30 in the morning and I was already running behind. This is hardly unusual, but it pisses me off every single time. — Julie Powell

I took a bite of lobster meat with rice. It was quite tasty. 'Arguing the morality of slaughter will send you into a tailspin of self-loathing every time.' 'Unless you're a vegan.' 'Uh-huh. But then you're a vegan and you don't count. — Julie Powell

The nice thing about having a friend who is crazier than you are is that she bolsters your belief in your own sanity. — Julie Powell

But hard bitten cynicism leaves one feeling peevish, and too much of it can do lasting damage to your heart. — Julie Powell

I got my undergrad in Creative Writing, and then I didn't get my Masters in obsession, because I figured I already had that covered. — Julie Powell

I felt like a Jane Austen heroine all of a sudden, confusedly looking on at all the people she loves, their myriad unpredictable couplings and uncouplings. There would be no marriages at the end of this Austen novel, though, no happy endings, no endings at all. Just jokes and friendships and romances and delicious declarations of independence. — Julie Powell

Cooking saved my life! Sure, there were some miserable moments, but that was sort of the point, to find something challenging and consuming enough to take a place in the center of my life into which was creeping a horrible feeling of stasis and the doom of mediocrity. — Julie Powell

Fiddling with damp tarragon left me so intensely irritated that when I was done I had to stick the ramekin/mise en place bowls back in the fridge and go watch both the episode where Xander is possessed by a demon and the one where Giles regresses to his outrageously sexy teen self and has sex with Buffy's mom, just to get over it. — Julie Powell

There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse ... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance. — Julie Powell

Everyone knows there are foods that are sexy to eat. What they don't talk about so much is foods that are sexy to make. — Julie Powell

It did not seem possible, much as he craved the comfort of a woman of intelligence, of humor and balance and perception. — Julie Powell

It's sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence. — Julie Powell

And I realized that, for this night at least, I didn't much care if anyone was the marrying kind or not - not even me. Who could tell? We none of us knew for sure WHAT kind we were, exactly, but as long as were the kind that could sit around eating together and having a lovely time, that was enough. — Julie Powell

I love that after a day when nothing is sure, and when I say 'nothing' I mean nothing, you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It's such a comfort. — Julie Powell

I began to ponder; this life we had for ourselves, Eric and I, it felt like the opposite of Potage Parmentier. It was easy enough to keep on with the soul-sucking jobs; at least it saved having to make a choice. But how much longer could I take such an easy life? Quicksand was easy. Hell, death was easy. Maybe that's why my synapses had started snapping at the sight of potatoes and leeks in the Korean deli. Maybe that was what was plucking deep down in my belly whenever I thought of Julia Child's book. Maybe I needed to make like a potato, winnow myself down, be a part of something that was not easy, just simple. — Julie Powell

Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart ... It's sad, but a relief as well to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds. — Julie Powell

It's all about the "French Paradox," that much-publicized puzzle of how French people eat all that fatty food and drink tons of wine, yet still manage to be svelte and sophisticated, not to mention cheese-eating surrender monkeys. — Julie Powell

People want to care about people. People look after each other, given the chance ... I believe just believing in goodness generates a tiny bit of the stuff, so that being so foolish as to believe in our better natures, if just for a day, we actually contribute to the sum total of generosity in the universe. — Julie Powell

Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else - not as fragile as we think they are. — Julie Powell

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. — Julie Powell

My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty: 'When the flood comes/ I will swim to a symphony/ go by boat to some picture show/ and maybe I will forget about you.' How did he know way, way back then? How is it I know only now? — Julie Powell

If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is. — Julie Powell

There is a law out there, if not of thermodynamics then of something equally primary and inescapable, that explains why everything from instant messaging to fabulous sex to aspic can in the end be defined as an illustration of the futility of existence. And it really, really sucks. — Julie Powell

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason. — Julie Powell

Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and an Internet connection can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be. — Julie Powell

Maybe if the men in my life weren't always making smart-ass comments, they wouldn't have to worry about bruises so much. — Julie Powell

Physically it's exhausting to cook every night. Existentially speaking, I have so much more energy having that time to myself in this project, this gift to myself at the end of the day. Even if it didn't go smoothly, it was still a gift. — Julie Powell

Unfortunately, Martha's recipes, though suitably complex, fall a tad short if you're looking for aphrodisiac cooking, perhaps only because everything about a Martha recipe, from the font it's printed in to the call for sanding sugar, with appended notes on where to find such a thing, simply screams Martha. — Julie Powell

For stalker food, Martha Stewart is the woman to go to. — Julie Powell

There are dinner parties ruined by guests, and there are dinner parties ruined by hosts, and then there are dinner parties when everyone contributes to the disaster. — Julie Powell

The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes — Julie Powell

The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that "simple" is not exactly the same as easy. — Julie Powell

If Daisy Buchanan's laugh is the sound of money, then a gimlet, well executed, is the color of it. It is just the thing when you are feeling impoverished, financially or spiritually. — Julie Powell

When I got home I peered down at the lobster to see how he was doing. The inner plastic bag was sucked tight around him and clouded up. It looked like something out of an eighties made-for-TV movie, with some washed-up actress taking too many pills and trying to off herself with a Macy's bag. — Julie Powell

These are the times when we aficionados of the gas stove know we are on the side of God. — Julie Powell

I love my husband like a pig loves shit. — Julie Powell

I have never looked to religion for comfort - belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking - childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting - I thought this was what prayer must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want. Reading MtAoFC was like reading pornographic Bible verses. — Julie Powell

Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It's not what I thought it was. I thought it wa all about-I don't know, confidence or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there's something else, somethng that these things grow out of. It's joy. — Julie Powell

I'm the kind of person, who, when bored or unhappy, either drinks myself into oblivion or cooks very unhealthy things; Sally is the kind of person who, when bored or unhappy, goes jogging or cleans the bathroom with a toothbrush or matriculates at rabbinical school. — Julie Powell

So the end may be a long time coming, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a way of sneaking up on you. — Julie Powell

Without the Project I was nothing but a secretary on a road to nowhere, drifting toward frosted hair and menthol addiction. — Julie Powell

There are times with your friends when you just have to put their whole mess out of your mind for a while. — Julie Powell

It was only once I was in the car ... that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming "Fuck!" in primal syncopation, were (1) I'd be embarrassed and (2) I didn't want to get my cute vintage suit any dirtier than it already was. Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill, those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy. — Julie Powell

A new enterprise awaits. It hangs before you like fruit on a tree. — Julie Powell

Metz's Perfection chronicles with lapidary precision one woman's climb back to happiness after not just a spouse's death, but also the shocking recognition that her life before that death was not what she had thought it was. The journey is a painful one, but Ms. Metz is much the stronger for having survived to recount it. — Julie Powell

Two years ago, I was a twenty-nine year old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one year old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me
I certainly would. — Julie Powell

The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer. — Julie Powell

I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility. — Julie Powell

Doors are going to open-doors you can't even imagine exist. — Julie Powell

How much more interior can you get, after all, than the interior of bones? It's the center of the center of things. If marrow were a geological formation, it would be magma roiling under the earth's mantle. If it were a plant, it would be a delicate moss that grows only in the highest crags of Mount Everest, blooming with tiny white flowers for three days in the Nepalese spring. If it were a memory, it would be your first one, your most painful and repressed one, the one that has made you who you are. — Julie Powell

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.
For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. — Julie Powell

The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons. — Julie Powell

I never really even tried. But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep. Oh Godm it really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary. — Julie Powell