Best Heartburn Quotes by Nora Ephron

"The most unfair thing about this whole business is that I can't even date."

"It was always a little mystifying to me how we had gone from having so much money to having so little."

"If you believe in miracles you have to believe in God."

"What should you do? Is this what you want in a husband?"

"It's like a beautiful thing that suddenly turns out to be broken into hundreds of pieces, and even when you glue it back together it's always going to have been horribly broken."

"I want him back so I can yell at him and tell him he's a schmuck."

"Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I'll show you a real asshole."

"I always wanted to be a witness. I’ve always wanted to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and spar with lawyers and be sketched by courtroom artists."

"I’ve always wanted to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

"I think of myself as a healthy person with a strong sex drive, but it’s never occurred to me to forgo meals."

"When will I ever understand that what’s astonishing about the number of men who remain faithful is not that it’s so small but that there are any of them at all?"

"The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was."

"I have a friend who attracts dwarfs. Every time she turns around, a dwarf is following her. It’s very disturbing."

"I always figured I had a better shot at them than at the conventionally good-looking ones."

"When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past."

"I was such a ninny that I thought: Thank God I’m getting married now, before I’m twenty-six and washed up."

"People are always telling me to relax—the hairdresser tells me to relax, and the dentist, and the exercise teacher, and the dozen or so tennis pros who have attempted to do something about my backhand—but the only time I think I’ve ever really relaxed in my entire life was for three minutes in the Pension Building dancing with Mark Feldman."

"You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy."

"I wanted a Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to The New Republic, a tennis player... Then I grew up and settled for a low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters."

"It seemed to me that the desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is fundamental and primal in women—is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal urge, which is to be single again."

"Beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own."

"It always amazes me that women like Meg Roberts ever manage to get anything sexual going in Washington, although obviously she knows something about drawing men out that I don’t."

"Sometimes it seemed to me that I had spent half my marriage in the men's department watching small white-haired tailors on their knees making chalk marks on Mark's trouser cuffs."

"The city of New York was a wonderful place, but it seemed terribly unimportant next to my marriage."

"It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."

"All beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion."

"It's hard to walk in lockstep with people a lot taller than you are, because they take longer strides, and you always feel like a little puppy scampering to keep up."

"One of the things that happens when you become a couple: you date other couples."

"The truth is, I wish you two would get married."

"The reason you're blue is that there isn't anyone to make them for you."

"We had driven miles to find the world's creamiest cheesecake and the world's largest pistachio nut and the world's sweetest corn on the cob."

"The trouble with Washington was that too many people there spent too much time figuring out what the trouble with it was."

"I have never been big on invention in that department."

"I would pick a recipe from Michael Field or Julia Child and shop on the way home and spend the first part of the evening painstakingly mastering whatever dish I had chosen. Then I would sit down to eat it in front of the television set."

"Once, I remember, one of my friends called up to say his marriage had ended on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant."

"I learned that the words 'monosodium glutamate' were almost automatically funny, especially aloud."

"What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure."

"I've never once made a quiche, for example—but I held my own, and I'm afraid that I'm still known in certain circles as the originator of a game called If You Had to Have Only One Flavor Soufflé for the Rest of Your Life, Would It Be Chocolate or Grand Marnier?"

"I love Richard. That I should have spotted him at that exact moment was really quite odd: the first night Richard and I slept together, he did an imitation of his father eating an onion, and I can almost never think of raw onions without remembering him."

"No one ever tells you these things—not that we would have listened had anyone tried. We were so smart. We were so old. We were so happy. We had it knocked."

"I think you often have that sense when you write—that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all."

"The baby wakes up in the middle of the night, and instead of jumping out of bed, you lie there thinking: Whose turn is it? If it's your turn, you have to get up; if it's his turn, then why is he still lying there asleep while you're awake wondering whose turn it is?"

"Now it takes two parents to feed the child—one to do it and one to keep the one who does it company. Now it takes two parents to take the child to the doctor—one to do it and one to keep the one who does it from becoming resentful about having to do it."

"Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it."

"My feeling about rice pudding is that if you like it, you already have a good recipe; and if you don’t, there’s no way anyone will ever get you to eat it, unless you fall in love with someone who likes rice pudding, which I once did, and then you learn to love it, too."

"The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream."

"Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it."

"But I would rather die than sit here and pretend it’s okay, I would rather die than sit here figuring out how to get you to love me again, I would rather die than spend five more minutes going through your drawers and wondering where you are and anticipating the next betrayal and worrying about whether my poor, beat-up, middle-aged body with its Caesarean scars will ever turn you on again."

"If I throw this pie at him, he will never love me. But he doesn’t love me anyway. So I can throw the pie if I want to."