Julie And Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen Quotes
"Simplicity itself. It sounds like poetry, doesn’t it? It sounds like just what the doctor ordered."
"Egg donation is still a new-enough technology that our slowly evolving legal and etiquette systems have not yet quite caught up; nobody knows if egg donators are going to be getting sued for child support ten years down the line or what."
"There is clarity in the act of peeling a potato, a winnowing down to one sure, true way."
"This French food stuff was a snap! I wondered why everybody had been making such a big deal out of it all these years."
"Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy."
"Julia Child wants you—that’s right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end middle-management job and nothing but a Stop and Shop for miles around—to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste all right."
"You can get used to anything, as long as you don’t mind collapsing a few mineshafts of your brain where the stuff you can’t think about is skulking around."
"But Julia Child isn’t about that. Julia Child wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life."
"Butchers must really need their beauty sleep."
"In the afternoon I manned the Family Room."
"I couldn’t see how anyone who’d actually lost someone to that sucking wound could stomach it."
"This was the job of the junior staff, during the anniversary of September 11."
"When I looked down there, I didn’t think of God and angels and the serene faces of the dead gone over to some Other Side; I just thought of body parts."
"It’s like bone rape. Oh God, did I just say that out loud?"
"It’s like eating life. It’s almost like eating my own life, you know?"
"So I handed out Kleenex to gay German brothers and bottled water to dotty English aunts."
"I’ve never been much of a graveyard-visiting kind of person."
"The Family Room was the only place these people could go to be near those they’d lost."
"The sight of the pink stuff on my cutting board was still making me feel sick, but I thought I detected another, more buried sensation as well."
"You know that dejection that comes upon you when you realize that the person you’re talking to might as well be from Jupiter, for all the chance you have of making them get what you’re saying?"
"Who could tell? We none of us knew for sure what kind we were, exactly, but as long as we were the kind that could sit around eating together and having a lovely time, that was enough."
"I realized that, for this night at least, I didn’t much care if anyone was the marrying kind or not—not even me."
"The secretaries but not the city planning interns, the girls from PR but not the guys from program development."
"Maybe, being Republicans, the senior staff had some family-values sort of notion that women possess inherent delicacy and sensitivity—despite the abundant evidence to the contrary within their own organization."
"A few other vague misgivings were floating around in the old brainpan as well."
"I am still pretty far from an egg-poaching expert, and these eggs weren’t going to be napped in cheese sauce—they were going to be out there in front of God and everybody, clothed only in a crystalline coating of calves’ foot jelly, and they had to be pretty."
"I woke up at six a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to finish putting the little bastards together."
"Gwen is not so much polite as she is considerate."
"The good thing about starting your Thanksgiving feast with Oeufs en Gelée is that everything afterward is going to taste pretty goddamned great by comparison."
"I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It’s not as if Gwen is some uncontainable libertine, Falstaff personified as an impressively bitter, petite blonde with fashion sense."
"I’m a secretary at a government agency, and so I can talk with some authority about things that are a pain in the ass."
"So sometimes I’m irritated by my husband, and sometimes I’m frustrated. But I can think of two times right off the top of my head when it’s particularly good to be married."
"I felt so married, all of a sudden, and so happy."
"It's an enviable perspective, but it’ll run you ragged if you have to keep up with her all the time."
"These overheated missives Isabel promptly shared not only with her entire e-mail list, but with Martin as well."
"I don’t want to save the marriage, I don’t want to be married to you anymore."
"Our beloved former mayor Rudolph Giuliani once maintained that the progress of civilization is all about keeping excrement off the walls."
"I just didn’t want to go to Chinatown. I had some bad associations there."
"Within this world maybe there are divides that, once crossed, separate people from one another, as surely as if they were in different universes."
"I made love to my husband who is also my partner, and the curtain closed, with Isabel forever on the other side."
"I thought I had never heard words so beautiful in all my life."
"He didn’t do anything but roll his eyes and grumble with careful good humor, but he knew what I was doing."
"The difference between Sauce Tartare and regular mayonnaise is that the base is not raw egg yolks, but hard-boiled ones."
"You will never have trouble with freshly made mayonnaise if you have beaten the egg yolks thoroughly in a warmed bowl before adding the oil, if the oil has been added in droplets until the sauce has commenced to thicken, and if you have not exceeded the maximum proportions of 3/4 cup of oil per egg yolk. . . ."
"It’s August! It’s ninety-five degrees in here! How fucking warm do you want it?"
"Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world."
"Julia Child began learning to cook because she wanted to share good food with her husband, because she’d fallen in love with great food late but hard, because she was in Paris, because she didn’t know what else to do with herself."
"Practically every single thing written about Julia since she died has ended the same way. It’s irresistible. It was her sign-off for forty years. It’s on her gravestone, for Christ’s sake. But I’m not going to do it."