Quotes from Laurie Colwin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal.

People who like to cook like to talk about food....without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people.

We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.