Lunch In Paris: A Love Story, With Recipes Quotes
"It turned out to be a decisive moment, more important for my future happiness than where I went to college or years with a good shrink."
"Since I’m also a New Yorker, you can take that last bit up a notch."
"Artfully worded e-mails flew back and forth."
"When you decide, as a culture, what you want to keep, you also have to decide what you are willing to forget."
"I love to watch people talk about subjects they are passionate about, especially if it’s something I know nothing about."
"Europe had that effect on me, ever since I stepped off the plane for the first time in college."
"I could already see the rising shadow of his beard."
"His turtleneck sweater was the color of warm milk."
"Never one to slap down my more precocious tendencies."
"By December, I’d invented a reason to come to Paris."
"It’s not that I wasn’t listening, but mostly I was watching his face."
"If you don’t have a gas bill, you don’t exist."
"Nothing says 'I love you' like a plate full of sausage."
"I wanted to open the door and roll under the wheels."
"I felt like Moses, wandering for years in the culinary wilderness, finally come home."
"I never had an imaginary friend, but I did have an imaginary life."
"I saw myself at the bottom of an enormous mountain, looking up, trying to decide if I was ready for a long, hard climb."
"I was the kid who stuck too close to the counselor at camp."
"It’s amazing how you can make the right decision for all the wrong reasons."
"I was the kind of shy that came off as haughty."
"I couldn’t think about what dream I wasn’t chasing or who I might be disappointing."
"It’s hard to say exactly what I was afraid of."
"For the first time in my life, I had nothing to do, nowhere to be."
"I bet these shoppers had never seen a fish stick."
"If you were older and uglier, I’d be grumpy right now."
"I thought about all the things I knew something about—eighteenth-century bookbinding, Victorian photography, Renaissance painting. Somehow I had missed this particular skill on my carefully groomed résumé."
"It was a superior stare. I’m on to you, he said. You’re nothing but a New York princess."
"Tell Tinker Bell to put that in a pipe and smoke it."
"I squealed as he sank his teeth into my neck. "Good dinner.""
""Ça va?" asked Gwendal, wrapping his arms around my waist while I rinsed the pot in the sink."
"He loves to catch me in the kitchen when my hands are busy."
"It’s like living with a toddler; I have to censor myself."
"Why be funny when you can be "deeply amusing" instead?"
"I don’t know what she thought of him, but clearly he thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas."
"I like flake, a croissant with an outer layer so fine and brittle that you get crumbs all over yourself from the very first bite."
"I was about to be initiated into a national sport: la manif."
""Better a crook than a fascist." Talk about the lesser of two evils."
"Just a couple of happy idiots, drunk on life."
"He’s just so fucking happy all the time. It’s weird."
"I know what I want. I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
"I was off to the races, my own little monologue."
"Money may not grow on trees, but it does come out of brick walls."
"He’s a happy person and I am fundamentally suspicious of happy people."
"My imaginary life was through, and my new life, my real life, was standing in front of me on the Paris sidewalk."
"How did she survive thirty-one years on this planet without a suit?"
"Gwendal and I are both only children, so it was clear that each side was offering up their most prized possession, hoping the others knew what a precious gift they were receiving."
"The restaurant’s specialty, épaule d’agneau confit, slow-roasted shoulder of lamb."
"The first apricots had appeared at the market, their skins fading from speckled red to glowing orange to burnished gold, like the sun-bleached walls of an Italian villa."
"It wasn’t what you’d call a raging success, but spooned over vanilla ice cream it wasn’t half bad."
"We were loud, raucous, totally inappropriate."
"I’ve abandoned my chouquettes. Pastry love is fickle that way."
"I was wearing the same clothes, holding the same drink, as a night out in New York, but everything felt wrong."
"I couldn’t just say yes to Gwendal. I had to say yes to Paris too."
"In Paris, most apartments, even rentals, come with no appliances."
"The apartment was at the tippy-top end of our price range."
"Everyone was swimming, not so much out of their depth as in a different pond."
"They inspected the stands at the same leisurely pace."
"Natacha pointed toward the bedroom door. A real door, with a handle and everything."
"The lamb had been cooked for hours, till it fell apart with the touch of a knife."
"You’ll want to watch the puffs the first time you make them, as every oven is different."
"The puffs can be made several hours in advance."
"Like the waiter at the Le Picotin, I like to bring the chocolate sauce to the table in a little pitcher or copper pot and let each guest serve according to his whim."
"Anyone who has ever planned a wedding will tell you that suddenly everyone has an opinion."
"Living in another culture is partly about learning to put aside the perfect in favor of the possible."
"One of the great gifts of an intercultural relationship is that when you fight, you never quite know if you are mad at the person, or at their culture."
"It’s like the UN: things escalate, but then everybody calms down for a minute while they look over the transcript for a mistranslation."
"America may have landed a man on the moon, but the French have the coolest wedding cakes on earth."
"Like most French people, I don’t think Gwendal ever expected fulfillment or recognition for his work."
"In France, before you sign any kind of legal contract, they read it out loud to the assembled parties."
"In the States, I could easily eat triple the amount that was now on my plate without considering whether I was actually hungry."
"My inner control freak had taken the day off, and in her place appeared a perfectly relaxed young woman."
"You need a project. It doesn’t matter if that’s exactly what you end up doing, as long as it helps you meet the right people."
"In France, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get the oil, it gets the evil eye."
"Do not, I repeat, do not attempt this (or any) recipe with those baby carrots sold in the plastic bag."
"Cauliflower doesn’t like to be overcooked—it gets gray and smelly—so don’t just leave the pot on the heat forever."
"Americans take a sense of endless possibility for granted. It makes us optimistic, sometimes insensitive, often a little greedy."
"There is still very much a proper way to do things, and more often than not, it’s the way things have always been done."
"Unlike so many teenagers and young adults, I’d always felt like my mother really 'got' me."
"Why can’t you just: Get a job, Make some friends, Find a dentist, Buy some mothballs, Get a life."
"This wasn’t new. Even now, I know we are gearing up for a fight when she starts a sentence with 'Why can’t you just...'"
"If I was touchy in London, at the moment I was downright electric—positively third-rail sensitive—about Paris."
"Why would anyone assume I had something in common with these people just because they’re American?"
"In fact, it’s not just the lacy negligees and designer handbags that are on display along the rue Saint-Honoré—it’s the women themselves."
"Implicit in the American dream is the idea of self-determination. The result of our just-do-it attitude is that anything you don’t do is your fault."
"Part of me knows it’s perverse, but I find this kind of self-flagellation comforting."
"The fact is, I don’t have an answer for him anymore. What I want is to go to lots of cocktail parties with famous writers... all while never having to sit down at my computer ever again."
"Sometimes life really is just like high school."
"What if I stopped to ask myself what would make me happy, instead of what would make me successful, respectable, worthy?"
"Sometimes there will be a Matt Dillon sighting in the neighborhood... I felt a flurry of butterflies in my stomach."
"I knew where they were going for dinner; it would cost half of what Gwendal earned in a month."
"How could I keep my American just-do-it attitude without the accompanying fear of failure?"
"Once I gave up control, relaxed the grip of my whitened knuckles... the squatters up and left."
"Affif’s New Year’s Feast... it never seems to pay to make less."