Quotes from Delia Ephron

Preparing for the worst is an activity I have taken up since I turned thirty-five and the worst actually began to happen.

In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.

The kitchen, dining room, and living room are mixed up together in a snuggly way, always warmed by the fireplace and the Aga. Peter has never seen an Aga, this gigantic iron cooking invention. I get to explain to him how it works, that the ovens and circular metal iron-topped grills are always on. I show him that you switch a pan from a high-heat grill to a low-heat one and control the cooking that way. It's like knowing a foreign language.

Julia has his pills on a timer, and every so often its bell goes off, startling us all, and Julia rushes to get the pills. God, illness is such an interference, and yet Richard's brain is as sharp as ever.

Richard still calls me "darling" in a heart-melting way. He tells me I'm brave to fall in love again and urges me on in my writing as he always does.

Our job as writers, as we begin that journey, is to figure out what we can do. Only do what you can do. It's a rule I live by. Among other things, it means I can have novels heavier with dialogue than description. But more important, if you only do what you can do, you never have to worry that someone else is doing it. It keeps you from competing. It keeps you looking inside for what's true rather than outside for what's popular. Ideally. Your writing is your fingerprint.

she was pregnant. Life could still hand out prizes.

Surprises don't come from people we know well, certainly not people we love. We call them surprises but they are inevitabilities.

Louisa and Marie are loving and caring, and these two dinners feel like betrayal. I mean, friendship betrayal. I take friendship seriously. A friendship is a trust.

People begin as they mean to continue.

The anatomy of what happens to each of us is shadowed and affected by what came before, and I was conditioned as a child to live with fear and worry.

We were social liars, amusing ourselves at dinner parties. Making it even more wicked and fun, this was the New York world of literati—people both brilliant and smug. We goofed on all of them. Our lies were power, we imagined, although why I'm not sure.

This visit is a bit of the same, and the same feels precious and fleeting.

Conversation, friendship, laughter, and understanding are my favorite sports

And one single thing about all this: We were both seventy-two and age meant nothing. We were getting as loopy, as obsessed with each other as anyone falling under the spell of romance.

If you think about something else hard enough, you can mostly control your feelings.

Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood? —GREGORY CORSO, "Marriage

I'm Catholic. I might have already mentioned that 'cause if you're Catholic, is it ever fucking not on your mind? I eat guilt for breakfast. I'll take life with a side of guilt—that's a joke we cracked like once a month. What's on the menu? Life with a side of guilt?

I got lost sorting out the ways I had aged out of the situation I was in.

dogs dig deep into your heart. They're in the room, on the floor, in your lap, on the bed, pestering you for treats, chewing your sock, burrowing under sheets, making you laugh, following you about, eating the cheese you left on the table, tearing in wild happy circles after baths. They trust. They are innocence. They are unjudgmental observers of your every unguarded moment.

Finn closed in behind Taylor, an instinct like a mobster's. Family first.

I believe doctors rarely have any idea how helpless patients can be when their brains are jumbled by fear, how unable they are to respond or take information in.

Writing taught me who I was, because your writing is your fingerprint

All these different friendships. Mine with Eugene is both business and personal. These bonds matter. They are little homes. Places of safety. I am taking stock now. Friendship. God, I love my friends.