Quotes from Kate Christensen

Famously cancer fighting, laden with vitamins, minerals, soluble fiber, and phytonutrients, broccoli and its relatives are among the healthiest ingredients of the human diet.

Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.

Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.

Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.

To eat passionately is to allow the world in.

Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.

It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It's nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.

Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it's important to wait, because once it's picked, it can't ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous.

I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.

Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.

After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths.

Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.

For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.

I grew up in an all-female family - two sisters and a mostly single mother - and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.

The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.

'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.

It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.

There's almost nothing you can't do with a cashew. Not only does it lend its nutty sweetness to savory dishes, it also gives desserts a deep richness.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.