Quotes from Nora Ephron

This year things are different. This year my husband is a stranger. Do not let this stranger see me eviscerated.

I can't believe they don't understand that what I'm doing is Much More Important. I'm reading the most wonderful book.

I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I'm a total mess and I will never be the same. I can't stop crying. She looks at me and says, "You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.

As a longtime journalist, this quote from the delicious Nora Ephron made me smile in recognition of its truth: Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy...everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes.

A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here's our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann's mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.

The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.

I'll tell you how sensible Arthur is: he doesn't even mind being bald.

Arthur shook his head. 'I've always been terrible at colors,' he said, 'It comes from having grown up with the single-row box of crayons instead of the big box. If I'd had the big box I would now know taupe and cerise and ecru. Instead, all I know is burnt sienna. And what good does it do me? Never once I have I heard anything described as burnt sienna. Never once have I heard anyone say, Follow that burnt sienna car.

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I can't believe I'm here without her.

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.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave?

How much worse can it get than finishing dinner, having him reach over, pull a hair out of my head, and start flossing with it at the table?

Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that's for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong.

Jonathan never takes anything personally; he always sees himself as a statistical reflection of a larger trend in society.

What did she look like?" "Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare.

The truth is that if my father weren't my father, he would be one of the men he hates; he is incorrigibly faithless and thoroughly narcissistic, to such an extent that I tend to forget he's also capable of being a real peach.

I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills. I tell you this, so you will understand that my antipathy toward 'Love Story' is not because I am immune to either sentimentality or garbage, two qualities the book possesses in abundance. When I read 'Love Story', and I cried, in much the same way that I cry from onions, involuntarily and with great irritation, I was deeply offended...

She's talking about condominiums, my friend Betty Searle called up to say one day. Obviously she's involved with someone. Are you sure? I said. Of course I'm sure, said Betty. The question is who. She thought for a minute. Maybe it's Senator Campbell, she said. He's talking condominiums, too. Senators always talk about condominiums, I said. That's true, said Betty.

I know, I said, but it scares me. It reminds me of my father. I'm not your father, said Mark. Repeat after me, 'Mark Feldman is not my father.' Mark Feldman is not my father, I said. Am I fat? said Mark. No, I said. Am I bald? No. Do I smell of Dr. Scholl's foot pads? No, I said. I rest my case, said Mark.

Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all.

Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century, but try the shuttle for the ultimate in shunning. All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts; all those men in suits who used to look at me with respect when I pulled out my American Express gold card, now barely able to conceal their contempt for me and my portable Wet Ones.

love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is most definitely love.

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they're never going to. And even though you know they're never going to, you still hope they will.

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.