Laurie Colwin Quotes

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.

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

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

Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

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.

At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.

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

Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.

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.

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.

she fought to keep the ugly, chaotic world at bay and to keep a sweet, pretty corner to live in.

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.

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.

Holly sat down, as if at home. But, Guido wondered, would she be happy where there were no trays?

Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

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.

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

I love the process of learning a thing. It’s doing a thing I find so boring.

Most of his time appeared to be spent bumming cigarettes from people whose annual income was about a fifth of his own.

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.

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.

I’d like to go to all the knitting shops,” Doria said. “I want to see some rustic, hand-pulled yarn. I would also like to see some colonial fabrics, and, if possible, I would like to have some contact with a loom.

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.

I feel that weaving is a precise metaphor for the way in which life is made,” she said. “By which I mean individually constructed. Any strand can be woven in at the dictation of the imagination. I think of the philosophy of history as a loom of that sort. It is, isn’t it?

In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, 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.

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

Anxiety, she thought, was like a flock of birds on a telephone line. When people came around they flapped off, and when the people went away they hopped back on.

We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable our own places are.

I'd rather be myself, and have gone through all this misery, than to be whatever it was I thought I was supposed to be.

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.

Her research revealed that knitting was a very popular indoor sport and that a loom was on permanent display at the Wool Institute, which also had a few samples of colonial fabric.

Unhappiness isn’t the worst thing in the world. It doesn’t last forever and it usually teaches you something about yourself.

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.

We polished off that breakfast like a pair of tigers and went through two pots of coffee. Charlie sat back in his chair, smoking a cigar. There was nothing specious in my happiness. It rang through me like a bell.

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.

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.

Life is never smooth to the great-granddaughter of tin peddlers who were kicked out of Russia,' said Misty. 'It's no accident that all my family is in one embattled profession or another. We're just waiting for the Cossacks to come back. When the Cossacks come to Connecticut, you'll understand.' Meanwhile, it was hard to feel much gloom at all, although to keep her balance, Misty clung to it wherever she found it.

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?

After all, family life was the mortar that kept the bricks together; the pitch that made the basket watertight; the chinking that kept out the wind and the weather. It was life itself, without an inch to spare. A person immersed in the realities of family life did not stop to ponder the meaning of life: that person was in life, up to his or her neck and beyond. The family was the beginning, the future, and the past. It protected the weak and the strong. It brought the like-minded together and gave the unalike a common cause. It gave shelter and hope. What more, Polly wondered, could a sensible person possibly want?

The Riders Placencia Beach, Belize, 1996 Americans aren’t overly familiar with Tim Winton, although in my mind he is one of the best writers anywhere. This novel is set in Ireland and Greece as a man and his daughter search for their missing wife and mother. Gripping. 2. Family Happiness Miacomet Beach, Nantucket, 2001 The finest of Laurie Colwin’s novels, this is, perhaps, my favorite book in all the world. It tells the story of Polly Demarest, a Manhattan woman who is torn between her very uptown lawyer husband and her very downtown artist lover. 3. Mary and O’Neil Cottesloe Beach, Western Australia, 2009 These connected stories by Justin Cronin will leave you weeping and astonished. 4. Appointment in Samarra Nha Trang Beach, Vietnam, 2010 This classic novel was recommended to me by my local independent bookseller, Dick Burns, once he had found out how much I loved Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. John O’Hara’s novel has all the requisite elements of a page-turner—drinking, swearing, and country club adultery, although set in 1930s Pennsylvania. This may sound odd, but trust me, it’s un-put-downable! 5. Wife 22 Oppenheimer Beach, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, 2012 If you like piña coladas… you will love Melanie Gideon’s tale of marriage lost and rediscovered. 6. The Interestings Steps Beach, Nantucket, 2013 And this summer, on Steps Beach in Nantucket, I will be reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. Wolitzer is one of my favorite writers. She explores the battles between the sexes better than anyone around.

Nora Ephron and Laurie Colwin. Choose one of their essay collections, like Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck or Colwin’s Home Cooking,

I don't call it gossip. I call it "emotional speculation." --Misty to Holly

This is the sort of stuff you buy when you intend to stay indoors and kick up a storm of passion,” she said.

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.

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.

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.

They wanted me to stay because they wanted me around: I was their direct link to Sam; I was his memento. And they were probably afraid that I might shoot myself, left alone with all Sam’s things.

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!

Bè, quello che voglio dire è che sono abituata al nostro legame e mi piacerebbe distaccarmi proprio per sentirne tutta la forza. Non si può capire se non ritornando e non si può ritornare se non ci si è distaccati.

He was meditating on the generosity of friendship and on the feeling that one steps outside oneself in happiness for one’s friends.

Her work had been going so well and now it was all going to end.

Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin

Her telephone voice was brisk and without any tone at all.

Todo había terminado, se dijo. Lo que había terminado era la persona que, hasta la víspera, había sido toda su vida: una persona a las puertas de algo. Y llevaba tanto tiempo siendo esa persona que dejar de serlo la asustaba. Esa persona había estado esperando Eso. Y Eso, por supuesto, era el amor. El amor consistía en poner tu personalidad en el escaparate para ver qué acababa atrayendo. Lo que atraía era un ser resplandeciente que caía del cielo y que, al instante, se enamoraba de ti por tu carácter. Que ese ser resplandeciente fuera Vincent Cardworthy era algo que a Misty le costaba bastante de creer, pero ahí lo tenía. Había caído del cielo y la quería por su carácter.

Holly le equilibraba la vida y se la hacía más agradable; pero despertaba en él una añoranza feroz, hasta cuando estaban en la misma habitación, como si él nunca pudiera saciarse. A veces le parecía un cristal de cuarzo grisáceo. Podías ver a través de él y también en su interior, y su perfección te dejaba boquiabierto. Buscabas información sobre él para saber cómo se había formado. Te lo llevabas a casa y lo guardabas como si fuera un tesoro. Se quedaba en el estante para que lo admiraran en todo su esplendor sin nunca, jamás, revelar el menor dato sobre sí mismo.

La ansiedad, pensó, era como una bandada de pájaros posados en un cable telefónico. Cuando se acercaba gente echaban a volar y cuando la gente se alejaba volvían dando saltitos

Polly había llorado tanto que se sentía deshidratada. El llanto juvenil es una cosa y el llanto adulto otra muy distinta. Las lágrimas de la juventud son limpiadoras, como las siestas o las duchas tonificantes. Una buena llorera hace que el joven que sufre sienta que se ha conseguido algo. Las lágrimas de la edad adulta dejan a la víctima seca y agotada. Dejan los ojos escocidos. Dejan a su paso un dolor bajo las costillas y en la frente.

A love affair was another amazing product of human ingeniousness, like art, like scholarship, like architecture. It was a created thing with rules, language, and reference. When it was finished it lived on in its artifacts: a million memories and gestures.