Mallory Viscardi > Mallory's Quotes

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
― Nora Ephron

“The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.”
― Nora Ephron

“I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted
most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.”
― Nora Ephron

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?”
― Nora Ephron

“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women."

[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996]”
― Nora Ephron

“I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.”
― Nora Ephron

“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”
― Nora Ephron

“In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. ”
― Nora Ephron

“…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.”
― Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

“You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.”
― Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

“Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.
Enough about that.The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.And now it's not.”
― Nora Ephron

“Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”
So I told her why.
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.”
― Nora Ephron

“Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the park. (Followed by a Lactaid.) My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso. (But no garlic, or I won't be able to sleep.) The other day I found a bakery that bakes my favorite childhood cake, and it was everything I remembered: it made my week.”
― Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

“[S]ometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late. (Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food business, I was hired by the caper people to develop a lot of recipes using capers, and it was weeks of tossing capers into just about everything but milkshakes before I came to terms with the fact that nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in in.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“So Lillian Ross came to the party. Before dinner, she asked my mother for a tour of the house. My mother showed her around, and at a certain point, Ross came upon a picture of my three sisters and me. “Are these your children?” she asked my mother. “Yes,” my mother said. “Do you ever see them?” Lillian Ross asked. That did it. My mother walked Lillian Ross downstairs and back to McKelway. “Out,” she said.”
― Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing

“Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

“I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck