Quotes from Julia Child

The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.

Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper.

I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.

In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

small helpings, no seconds, no snacking, and a little bit of everything. - Julia Child

Bon Appétit

I admired the English immensely for all that they had endured, and they were certainly honorable, and stopped their cars for pedestrians, and called you "sir" and "madam," and so on. But after a week there, I began to feel wild. It was those ruddy English faces, so held in by duty, the sense of "what is done" and "what is not done," and always swigging tea and chirping, that made me want to scream like a hyena

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.

We ate the lunch with painful politeness and avoided discussing its taste. I made sure not to apologize for it. This was a rule of mine. I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make... Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is vile,...then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile- and learn from her mistakes.

She was my first cat ever, and I thought she was marvelous.

the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.

We hit it off immediately, especially Helene, who was a 'swallow-life-in-big-gulps' kind of person.

I'm not a chef. I think in this country, we use the term very loosely. I'm a cook and a teacher.

It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)

Illegitemus non carborundum est ("Don't let the bastards grind you down").

operational proof...it's all theory until you see for yourself whether or not something works.

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.

I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

When I wasn't at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and though no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating....By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history.

Ye gods! But you're not standing around holding it by the hand all this time. No. [...] [T]he dough takes care of itself. [...] While you cannot speed up the process, you can slow it down at any point by setting the dough in a cooler place [...] then continue where you left off, when you are ready to do so. In other words, you are the boss of that dough.

We are so bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively.

Well, all I know is this—nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.

Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child