Quotes from Julie Powell

At the end I am always alone.

Ma o cinismo persistente deixa uma pessoa rabugenta e, em demasia, pode provocar estragos duradouros no nosso coração.

Last night I had a dream that I was about halfway up a sheer cliff, endlessly high. Up ahead of me was, it seemed, everyone I'd ever known—the guys at the shop, my family, Gwen, Eric, D—and they were pulling ahead, climbing fast, leaving me behind. I tried to call out but found I had no voice, that my words slurred and died in my mouth, that I could not be heard. I awoke with a terrified lurch, unable to scream. I have this dream all the time.

Eric had to make me wake up for long enough to take out my contacts.

I can't imagine D ever having such a problem, ever having any sort of problem with sex at all. Though maybe the way he paraglided right off my planet, as soundlessly and utterly as the ivory-billed woodpecker that birders will spend the rest of their lonesome lives searching for, is a symptom of his own disease. I'd like to believe that.

It did not seem possible, much as he craved the comfort of a woman of intelligence, of humor and balance and perception.

When Hans asks for more volunteers, half a dozen people step eagerly forward, but I am not one of them. I tell myself it's because I should let the tuition-paying students, those who are here legitimately, get the experience, but the truth is that somewhere deep inside I don't want to be a party to this slaughter, that I feel somehow less culpable as an observer than as a participant. Nonsense, of course.

I have never looked to religion for comfort—belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking—childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting—I thought this was what prayer must feel like.

I followed their gaze to a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give to the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete irectly behind me.

reading was how I got my ya-yas out.

The loon started smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. Fuck! she yelled. Fuck! FUCK!

The loon placed both palms down on the concrete in front of her and—CRACK!—smacked her forehead hard on the ground.

It's been years, and yet she still talks about my first New York studio like it was the hole in a Khmer Rouge prison.

Oggigiorno, chiunque disponga di uno scalcinato laptop e di un accesso a Internet può fare sentire il proprio grido barbarico, qualunque sia il suo motore propulsore. Ma, sorpresa!, per ogni persona che ha qualcosa da dire sembra ci sia almeno qualcun altro disposto ad ascoltare. E, in qualche caso, non si tratta nemmeno di parenti.

It's sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.

The thing I keep learning about endings is that they aren't a long time coming, and that they don't sneak up on you either, because endings just don't happen.

Trussed chickens always look like sex-crime victims, pale and flabby and hogtied. It turns out that this goes double for trussed half-chickens.

Something about knowing exactly what you're doing, and why.

It looked like something out of an eighties made-for-TV movie, with some washed-up actress taking too many pills and trying to off herself with a Macy's bag.

If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is.

Lulled by the calming music of ice clattering in the cocktail shaker, I began to ponder; this life we had going for ourselves

You love me? Who loves you?

So the end may be a long time coming, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a way of sneaking up on you.

If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is.