Laurie Colwin

 “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”

― Laurie Colwin

“To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.”
― Laurie Colwin

“The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.”
― Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.”
― Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim

“At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.”
― Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object

“For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.”
― Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.”
― Laurie Colwin

“Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.”
― Laurie Colwin, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking

“Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin, Another Marvelous Thing

“We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“I put my lilies in front of Sam’s plaque. I didn’t want him to rest in peace. I wanted him to bounce around in death as he had in life, fearless, goofy, and fleet.”
― Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

“When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge.”
― Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

“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.”
― Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness

“How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications.”
― Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over