Laurie Colwin Quotes & Sayings

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

No one who cooks cooks alone. — Laurie Colwin

The sharing of food is the basis of social life. — Laurie Colwin

That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional. — Laurie Colwin

He was the soul of kindness and concern. The fact that he had talked to my father about this made me want to stab him. But I only said, "I'll talk to Patrick. This doesn't sit right with me. — Laurie Colwin

Somehow or other, I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd. — Laurie Colwin

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

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

The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people. — Laurie Colwin

As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical. — Laurie Colwin

I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed. — Laurie Colwin

Lentils are friendly - the Miss Congeniality of the bean world. — Laurie Colwin

Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that. — Laurie Colwin

We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes. — Laurie Colwin

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

My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me. — Laurie Colwin

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato. — Laurie Colwin

Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you. — Laurie Colwin

Provision as much pure and organic food as you can, and let the rest go by. — Laurie Colwin

Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home. — Laurie Colwin

She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities
this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny. — Laurie Colwin

Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence. — Laurie Colwin

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

When it comes to cakes and puddings, savouries, bread and tea cakes, the English cannot be surpassed. — Laurie Colwin

There is really a je ne sais quoi about turkey cooking - the air of festivity, the family squabbles, the constant basting - that does not apply to the turkey breast, which is, really, a convenience of food ... A turkey without seasonal angst is like a baseball game without a national anthem, a winter without snow, a birthday party without candles. — Laurie Colwin

When life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is not four perfect courses, each in a lovely pool of sauce whose ambrosial flavors are like nothing ever before tasted, but rather something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion - something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe. — Laurie Colwin

Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed. — Laurie Colwin

It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over. — Laurie Colwin

Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be. — Laurie Colwin

I come from a coffee-loving family, and you can always tell when my sister and I have been around, because both of us collect all the dead coffee from everyone's morning cup, pour it over ice, and drink it. This is a disgusting habit. — Laurie Colwin

The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: Even the simplest food is a gift. — Laurie Colwin

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

For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start. — Laurie Colwin

Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal, — Laurie Colwin

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille. — Laurie Colwin

In this world of uncertainty and woe, one thing remains unchanged: Fresh, canned, pureed, dried, salted, sliced, and served with sugar and cream, or pressed into juice, the tomato is reliable, friendly, and delicious. We would be nothing without it. — Laurie Colwin

[On television:] It's made people moronic, it's robbed people of their ability to think. It's done tremendous damage, and every single household that has a small child should take it and throw it out the window. — Laurie Colwin

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

We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living. — Laurie Colwin

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. — Laurie Colwin

When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook's strongest ally. I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over, I ate it cold the next day on bread. — Laurie Colwin

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins. — Laurie Colwin

I put my lilies in front of Sam's plaque. I didn't want him to rest in peace. I wanted him to bounce around in death as he had in life, fearless, goofy, and fleet. — Laurie Colwin

The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone's knee. — Laurie Colwin

Cookbooks hit you where you live. You want comfort; you want security; you want food; you want to not be hungry and not only do you want those basic things fixed, you want it done in a really nice, gentle way that makes you feel loved. That's a big desire, and cookbooks say to the person reading them, 'If you will read me, you will be able to do this for yourself and for others. You will make everybody feel better.' — Laurie Colwin

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books. — Laurie Colwin

I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in. — Laurie Colwin

People who like to cook like to talk about food ... without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago. — Laurie Colwin

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

It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life. — Laurie Colwin

When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge. — Laurie Colwin

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

We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us. — Laurie Colwin

Yes, there was a trick to it. You inherited your life, or you invented it. You figured out what you wanted life to be and then somehow or other you made it that way. Then, miracle of miracles, you liked it! — Laurie Colwin

At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden. — Laurie Colwin

It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else. — Laurie Colwin

I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook. — Laurie Colwin

Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good. — Laurie Colwin

The fact is that modern life has deprived us of life's one great luxury: time. — Laurie Colwin

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse. — Laurie Colwin

The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people. — Laurie Colwin

Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment. — Laurie Colwin

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

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

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

There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down. — Laurie Colwin

On Saturday mornings I would walk to the Flavor Cup or Puerto Rico Importing coffee store to get my coffee. Often it was freshly roasted and the beans were still warm. Coffee was my nectar and my ambrosia: I was very careful about it. I decanted my beans into glass ... and I ground them in little batches in my grinder. — Laurie Colwin

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

I myself am not particularly interested in restaurant cooking. I don't really want to learn how to make a napoleon. I'd much rather learn how to make a very good lemon cake, which you can make in your own home. I like plain, old-fashioned home food. — Laurie Colwin

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends. — Laurie Colwin

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