Imogen Quotes

I don't do what I'm told, but I might do what you want if you ask me nicely.

Even the Inquisitor's eyebrows shot up when Magnus strode through the gate. The High Warlock was wearing black leather pants, a belt with a buckle in the shape of a jeweled M, and a cobalt-blue Prussian military jacket open over a white lace shirt. He shimmered with layers of glitter. His gaze rested for a moment on Alec's face with amusement and a hint of something else before moving on to Jace, prone on the ground. "Is he dead?" he inquired. "He looks dead." "No," snapped Maryse. "He's not dead." "Have you checked? I could kick him if you want." Magnus moved toward Jace. "Stop that!" the Inquisitor snapped, sounding like Clary's third-grade teacher demanding that she stop doodling on her desk with a marker.

The Inquisitor stared at him as if he were a talking cockroach. "Do you know about the cuckoo bird, Jonathan Morgenstern?" Jace wondered if perhaps being the Inquisitor—it couldn't be a pleasant job—had left Imogen Herondale a little unhinged. "The cuckoo bird," she said. "You see, cuckoos are parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests. When the egg hatches, the baby cuckoo pushes the other baby birds out of the nest. The poor parent birds work themselves to death trying to find enough food to feed the enormous cuckoo child who has murdered their babies and taken their places." "Enormous?" said Jace. "Did you just call me fat?" "It was an analogy." "I am not fat.

Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

How is it that you can see your enemies so clearly and never your friends?

As they began to tie me, I wanted to yell out, to release some of my fear that way, but I held it in. Imogen wouldn't be that far from here yet, and I didn't want her to know what was about to happen. If it was possible to scream on the inside, though, I was, and the sound of it was deafening.

Wherever our lives lead us, one thing is certain. You and I will always be connected. You might be able to deny that, but I can't. Even I am not that good a liar.

Once we were alone, Imogen unfolded her hand. In it, she held the key to the chains. I had passed it to her while we were in the embrace. Roden noticed it and scowled. "You gave her the key and not me? I could be free already." I smiled at him. "Yes, but I wasn't going to kiss you." "Fair enough

Sage: "Conner's held you down for so long, you've forgotten what it's like to breathe free air." Imogen: "And you've given your life to his control forever. You'll never breathe free air again.

I’ve always thought she was a better match for you.” “I know the feeling well. And you are strong and fierce and have a ruthless streak, too. Not to mention you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. That mind of yours is sexy as hell. Imogen and I are just friends. Trust me, she wasn’t looking at me, and even if she were…Gods help me, I’m only looking at you.

Imogen- I'm Not Homophobic, I'm An ally Darcy: Congratulations? Tara: We thank you for You're Service

You don't think happy endings are stupid anymore?" "Your question is irrelevant," Imogen said. "This isn't the end.

It's like there's this idea that you have to earn your label through suffering. And then you have to prove it with who you date, how you dress, how other people perceive you.

I've got the baby here," Imogene barked at the Wise Men. "Don touch him! I named him Jesus.

Get up, Imogen, and get yourself ready for battle. From now on, the orders around here are going to come from me." "And the first thing you're going to do is free my son from that accursed Malachi Configuration.

It feels bigger than I want it to be. Do I really have to announce this? Can't I just feel something and live inside it while it's happening and not analyze it to death?

Even the sidewalks in ‪‎New Orleans‬ had personality.

It's fucking wild if you think about it, how well being totally checked out emotionally can look like normal American masculinity.

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.

Every breath she breathes feels like a love letter.

Because there's beauty in the breakdown.

I’ve lived in this world a long time, and you can’t change what you like, even if you’d want to.

...nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder.

How very interesting." Imogen gave a dainty sniff." I collect that you also poured some of the brandy down his lordship's throat. Was that part of the treatment?" “Absolutely critical," Matthias murmured.

Do you know about the cuckoo bird, Jonathon Morgenstern?" Jace wonderwd if perhaps being the Inquisitor—it couldn't be a pleasant job—had left Imogen Herondale a little unhinged. "The what?" "The cuckoo bird," she said. "You see, cuckoos are parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests. When the egg hatches, the baby cuckoo pushes the other baby birds out of the nest. The poor parent birds work themselves to death trying to find enough food for the enormous cuckoo child who has murdered their babies and taken their places." "Enormous?" said Jace. "Did you just call me fat?" "It was an analogy." "I am not fat.

So which one of us is more queer?" "Well," I pause, "I'd have to see the two of you trying to sit in chairs.

Buddy ran down the road, turned into another street, and vanished as if he had never been there, like another ghost from New Orleans's past.

The carriage could only clop along at about ten miles per hour, which only accentuated Imogene’s excitement. She urged it onward: "Fly, horse, fly!

Maybe convincing yourself that you could never transition is a defense mechanism that enabled you to survive high school, family, work—but like most defense mechanisms, it wasn’t conscious, and like most defense mechanisms, it became a pattern you weren’t aware of, and then, like most defense mechanisms, at some point it stopped making your life easier and started making your life harder.

It's a shift from a spiraling I hope I'm doing this right to the ache of I hope.

How do I know it’s not a fluke? What if I only ever fall for one girl?” “Then you’re bi.” She pats my arm. “What if I’m talking myself into it?” “Not a thing—” “Okay, but what if the girl I like is kind of—I don’t know—boyish?” “Is she a boy?” Edith asks. “No.” “Sounds pretty bi.

Well, I can’t help going to see Sibyl play, even if it is only for an act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe." "You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can’t you?" He shook his head. "To night she is Imogen," he answered, "and tomorrow night she will be Juliet." "When is she Sibyl Vane?" "Never." "I congratulate you.

The morning sun in New Orleans felt like it was trying to make a point, convincing the old world to believe something new.

The only way he could truly stick out in New Orleans was if he were walking down the street on fire.

Imogen was a bright girl naturally, but she had read so many novels that her brain was completely turned.

For on the far wall, a girl with long brown hair and tea-colored eyes was slowly rising to her feet. Imogen.

The stories are of men who, walking on the shore, hear sweet voices far away, see a soft white back turned to them, and - heedless of looming clouds and creaking winds - forget their children's hands and the click of their wives' needles, all for the sake of the half-seen face behind a tumble of gale-tossed greenish hair.

You definitely need to make him tell you about the venin he took down just outside Draithus." "You what?" My stomach pitches sideways. "Thanks for that, asshole." Xaden glares at Garrick. "Just doing my part to help your communication skills thrive in a stable relationship." Garrick turns and walks backward, lifting his hands in a shrug. "Like you have any room to talk about stable relationships," Imogen counters

... but eventually I nudged the old bandages in the corner toward me. Once I had them in my hands, I unwound them to their full length. "What are you doing with those?" Roden asked, "You're not injured." "The vigils are forbidden from harming me tonight. Vargan was very clear that I wasn't to come out tomorrow looking like a martyr." My grin widened." But don't worry, Avenia already fell for this trick once before. They love it." "That's your trick?" Roden asked. "Can't you take this seriously?" "If you understood what Vargan's men did to me, you'd know exactly how serious I am." "Hush now," I said. "Imogen needs to sleep, I need to think and you need to... let me think.

Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren't letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? Did they decide to read a store just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we've stopped enjoying our lives?

But as far as I'm concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman--sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby.

As to her education..." says Angelica. "'Tis done," says Mrs Lippard. "Her school could do no more for her." "I learned nothing," growls Sukie. "You read every book they had." "If I had known there were so few, I would have read slower.

I'd like to yell," said Imogene, "but this hardly seems like the time, does it?" She grimaced. "Willard, can you take the scissors? My hand is getting a cramp." "Certainly, Lady Strauss." "And promise you'll kill her. No gallantry, now." "Madam." He frowned at her. "I am a butler. Do you truly believe that I do not know how to dispatch a houseguest if required?

It was one of those days in August where the road looks like an illusion, melting and changing shapes.

James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they'd like to know: he ignores the shit out of her.

you can't be one of the people in a relationship if you're busily refusing to be a person.

I wouldn't call it a gut punch - more like a tiny, sharp poke beneath my rib cage. Other people's inside jokes always hit me like that, but I can never quite pin down the feeling. A variation of loneliness, maybe." -Imogen

My head’s a shaken snow globe, glitter suspended in liquid.

With girls, it was more like that feeling you get when you finish a book and your brain can’t quite shake it.

Imogene always sits on the remote. It’s probably wedged between her butt cheeks.” “Should I go get a crowbar?

They filled Woolsey Castle with music and art, drifting about in a fog of intellectualism, and like any fog, they were unpredictable and occasionally quite damp. Imogene

A good wife would have sorted him out and put him on the right road..." There comes that right road again. I wonder where it is? Imogen thought

Maybe one day we’ll talk about it. Maybe I’ll find the words, and she’ll find a way to hear them. Then we’ll cry and hug and years will pass, and we’ll move past it. It’ll be just a little bump in our backstory. Or maybe for us, it ends here. Maybe Gretchen’s my backstory.

One's signed, one's my reading copy, and one's for emergencies

For mermaids are the most unnatural of creatures and their hearts are empty of love.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them. Being on unsure, weird social footing.

How weirdly does a person have to sit to count as bisexual?

Because shaving and putting on a bunch of foundation every day are emotionally exhausting reminders of being trans, she gets a step removed from them by monologuing like she’s explaining them to someone.

Gentrification had stopped dead several doors west of my spot overlooking Avenue B. You could actually see the line. That side of the line; Biafran cuisine, sparkling plastic secure window units, women called Imogen and Saffron, men called Josh and Morgan. My side of the line; crack whores, burned-out cars, bullets stuck in door frames, and men called Father-Eating Bastard. It’s almost a point of honour to live near a crackhouse, like living in a pre-Rudy Zone, a piece of Old New York.

We get both of you?" Ridoc offers a quick smile. "Maybe we have a shot of lasting an hour." "My money's on two," Sawyer chimes in with a nod. "Both of you shut up before I knock your heads together," Imogen warns from a seat behind us. "Anything less than four hours is unacceptable.

...she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized. If you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

Our eyes meet, and in my brain, it’s like daybreak.

The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism become a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern.

She is such a conduit of rage, it is a wonder she does not catch alight.

Imogen looked at Ty, at the one man who could halt her stone-cold logic and make her just feel.... She needed that, to be caught off guard, to learn to trust her first gut reaction to her emotions. There had been no hesitation on her part - he had asked and her heart had sung out a big fat yes.

He's got no head!" said Imogene. She sounded more outraged than frightened, as if the notion of monsters going around without heads was a terrible social faux pas. "Things don't just walk around without heads!" "Chickens, sometimes," offered Willard. "That was not helpful, Tom." "No, but I've already poured tea, so I'm afraid I've run out of helpful things to do at the moment.

The sun’s going down and there’s nothing like a sunset in New Orleans. They say every woman looks beautiful by candlelight, and I say every city looks beautiful by sunset. This one’s glorious.

But then I was at the base of the steps, staring up at Imogen. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. "What happened to you?" she asked. I smiled. "I was nearly blown up, jumped through a waterfall, and Darius rides his horse like an old man, but I'm better now and you look beautiful. Will you marry me, Imogen?

I happened to look at Imogene and I almost dropped by hymn book on a baby angel. Everyone had been waiting all this time for the Herdmans to do something absolutely unexpected. And sure enough, that was what happened. Imogene Herdman was crying. In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn't even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there-awful old Imogene-in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying. Well. It was the best Christmas pageant we ever had.

We were on the patio, Tristan grilling us burgers, as we watched the kids playing in the their park of a backyard. … I pointed a Nikolaj, huddled together with Imogen. “No fucking way,” I told Tristan. “That right there is not happening.” He curled his lip at me, waving a hand at Cleo and Duncan. They were holding hands. They were only six, but that wasn’t the point. “What about that right there? What the ever-loving fuck is up with that? I’ll tell you right now I won’t stand for it.

The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a 'serious' education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies....Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art -- beautiful or meaningful or emotive art -- is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunningham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting. But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you're not up to the task -- that you can't do it, or can't do it well, or can't do it again; or that you're not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all -- and for those who do, trouble isn't long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms: "I am not an artist -- I am a phony. I have nothing worth saying. I'm not sure what I'm doing. Other people are better than I am. I'm only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]. I've never had a real exhibit. No one understands my work. No one likes my work. I'm no good. Yet viewed objectively, these fears obviously have less to do with art than they do with the artist. And even less to do with the individual artworks. After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about. Art is a high calling -- fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others -- indeed anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.

Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.

Second of all, what’s the point of having a shed if you’re not going to use it to make out with girls?

Queerness recognizing queerness. It’s kind of beautiful when you think about it.

I believe that if children fall in love with wildlife they will grow up wanting to protect it.

But sexuality was complicated and feelings weren’t always finite. Connecting to another human was hard enough without rules and regulations attached to it.

So basically, I'm like, who the fuck are you Maria Griffiths? A fucking idiot, is who.

From a thread of sky to the warp and weft of your being You're beautiful, graceful, like no other; You're pretty damn good as you are.

Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body.

A loss is not a void. A loss is a presence all its own; a loss takes up space; a loss is born just as any other thing that lives.

All cats are grey with the candles out.

Tessa’s eyes catch mine, and her lips tug up at the corners, just barely. And the noise in my brain falls away. All the times I said I’m straight. All the times everyone’s said I’m straight. There it was, underlined and written in bold. How could I miss it? Like finding Waldo and realizing he was never really hiding.

It’s time to make much of time, to gather the rosebuds while we may, like the poet says.” Thurston grabbed Jackson’s arm. His face lit up, as if he’d just had a brilliant thought. “Yes, that’s Robert Herrick. ‘And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

She gave a sigh and turned to meet Rafe's sardonic glance. "He's not for you," Rafe said, leaning close to her. "I can't think what you mean," Imogen said loftily, accepting a glass of lemonade from Brinkley. "You know precisely what I mean, you little witch," Rafe said, and there wasn't even a gleam of amusement in his eyes. "You mean to have him, don't you? I've seen that look in your eyes before. That look has had you in trouble before.

The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it? The trick, of course, is rejecting the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis. Or, really, a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.

I realized I'd always believed what other people said about me. What he'd said about me. We remember everything other people say about us, I think. Wear a skin made of all those words, so that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, that's what we see. I was starting to pick that skin away, and I was happy. I liked what I found underneath.

Coming out as trans was the first change she actually made to her own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against the grain because she felt like she'd die if she didn't.

Jackson watched in amazement that she had convinced the driver to handle the vehicle in such a way. Tourists began taking pictures of Imogene, standing tall in the seat while the driver guided the horse with the reins. She kept her eye trained on Catfish, describing his every step as if the driver couldn’t see the runner for himself … Catfish stopped at the “T” in the road up ahead. He was heaving air, and Imogene said, “We’ve worn him out, son. Keep on him. He’s ours for the catchin’.

I was born without the flirt gene. It's truly awful for me." That was no exaggeration. " I mean, look at how I screwed up last night with Ty. He was flirting and tossing off sexual innuendos, and I just looked at him and said I would not have anal sex with him." "You what?" Suzanne shrieked so loud that Imogen saw half a dozen other fitness patrons swivel their heads to look at them. "Did he ask you to? At the party?" "No, of course not." Which was what made it all the more ridiculous. "We were in the car and he was hinting about positions, what was to come, etc., and I just blurted out that I wasn't doing that with him." "Girl..." was Suzanne's though on the matter, her expression one of total horror. "Do not bring up the back door unless he's knocking on it.

The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word.

The alleged ‘science’ of autogynephilia is about making up categories to understand why J Michael Bailey wants to bone some trans women but not others. It’s about framing trans women as men in order to understand deviant male sexuality, without ever looking at female sexuality.

It’s a problem, you grow up reading about punk and grunge and earnest dude rock in all the magazines andinternalizing the idea that artifice is totally bullshit, man, and we wear these clothes because they’re comfortable, not for any kind of fashion statement, and we’re just trying to communicate, not be cool, and then you transition and realize, oh shit, there is going to have to be some intentionality in the way I present my body and my actions. I am going to have to break the patterns of clothing and voice and hair I’ve had in place all my life if I’m ever going to be read the way I want to be read. Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het, and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

She just knew that she felt weird – but literally every teenager feels weird. Who doesn't feel weird? All the music she listened to was about feeling weird. All the books she read were about feeling weird. So when she was seventeen it didn't seem strange to hang out with, like, a kid who was really into racism and another, a future truck stop mechanic, in a tent, with a ton of flannel and a bottle of Everclear or a dozen hits of acid. In a cow pasture. That was just, like, what you did. On one level you just went along with what was going on but on another you mythologized what a cool outlier you were and so you internalized a sense of your own weirdness as a badge of pride even as you emotionally dissociated yourself from it. Everybody cool is weird. This is how she mythologized her sense of being trans without understanding that she was trans.

...your kinks aren't arbitrary things your brain comes up with. They're not coincidences from childhood that you fetishize. Or: they could be. But kinks are arrows giving you directions. If you're hot for being whipped, that probably says something about your relationship to guilt and punishment, or pain, or something... It's always complicated and emotionally volatile but there's also no reason to be ashamed of it.

...there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic... The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren't sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.

Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever. That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit: she did not care about school, but she knew her parents would be sad if she didn’t go to college, since certain things are expected from you when you do well on standardized tests, so she scraped by and paid attention. Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation. She never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything. And then she came to New York, paid her rent, had a job, kept her head down, had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work. It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.

Sometimes it seems like being trans is the only bad thing that has ever really happened to Maria. Like she’s got a turtle shell to keep anything bad from ever happening to her, and with that shell there she can’t move. Probably what Maria needs more than anything is for something pretty bad but not catastrophic to happen to her. Maybe this breakup can be that thing, but probably not. It sounds like Maria’s already spinning it into an opportunity for self-mythologizing instead of for learning or growth or whatever. Which Maria will go on to talk about when she meets her own next girlfriend. Here is what I’ve figured out about myself, here is how emotionally honest I can be, here is how vulnerable I am. With cussing.

Below the surface, the force driving noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty, from constricting relationships, from the limitations of the self. Noir found its fullest expression in America because the American psyche harbors a passion for independence . . . With this desire for autonomy comes a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. The more we crave success, the more we dread failure; the more we crave freedom, the more we dread confinement. This is the shadow that spawns all of noir’s shadows: the anxiety imposed by living in a country that elevates opportunity above security; one that instills the compulsion to “make it big," but offers little sympathy to those who fall short. Film noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society - or by themselves. Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist. . . . Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind - the darkest city of all.

Like, okay. Do you know any straight, male-assigned men who kind of get it? Like, they try to be feminist, but they acknowledge that it is a complicated, maybe impossible thing for a man to be a feminist, so they're respectful of women, and give space, stand back, whatever. And it would be totally great except that it leads to them never doing anything? Like they just stand back, and, say there are some books that need to be shelved, the windows are all dirty, there are boxes that need to go outside, and some kid threw up somewhere. You will start, say, carrying the boxes outside, and then when that's done, you start mopping up the puke, and he is just standing there, so you're like, What the fuck! Are you going to move these books or clean a window? And they're like, Oh, okay, totally, in this very enlightened way that gives you space to fucking do everything, except they need you to show them how to clean a window, because they don't want to do it wrong? That kind of guy. I will admit: it's more complicated than that, right, I shouldn't be mean. Straight dudes have it kind of rough if they don't want to shake out their male privilege all over the place. But really? You don't know how to make a bed? You don't know how to fucking cook the onions and garlic before you throw in all the other vegetables?