Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“The last thing a chef wants in a line cook is an innovator, somebody with ideas of his own who is going to mess around with the chef's recipes and presentations. Chefs require blind, near-fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield conditions.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“A three-star Italian chef pal of mine was recently talking about why he — a proud Tuscan who makes his own pasta and sauces from scratch daily and runs one of the best restaurant kitchens in New York — would never be so foolish as to hire any Italians to cook on his line. He greatly prefers Ecuadorians, as many chefs do: 'The Italian guy? You screaming at him in the rush, "Where's that risotto?! Is that fucking risotto ready yet? Gimme that risotto!" . . . and the Italian . . . he's gonna give it to you . . . An Ecuadorian guy? He's gonna just turn his back . . . and stir the risotto and keep cooking it until it's done the way you showed him. That's what I want.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential : Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“At the base of my right forefinger is an inch-and-a-half diagonal callus, yellowish-brown in color, where the heels of all the knives I've ever owned have rested, the skin softened by constant immersion in water. It distinguishes me immediately as a cook, as someone who's been on the job a long time. You can feel it when I shake my hand, just as I feel it on others of my profession. It's a secret sign, a sort of Masonic handshake without the silliness.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and . . . dishonest, making a buck writing.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Very few of us are what we seem.”
― Agatha Christie, The Man in the Mist

“True fear has nothing to do with what might happen to you, however painful or vile that might be. True fear is all about what might happen to someone you love.”
― Erin Kellison, Shadow Bound

“Her mom... had always been there, her love as basic and necessary as gravity, until one day she wasn't.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“The vodka warmed his body nicely, like an invisible hand stroking him in places no one had touched in years.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.
What kind of idiot came up with that rule? The didn't understand human nature at all.
She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two different entities with seperate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn't realise that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“The world was more dangerous than it had been a few weeks ago. It was a world that slipped and slid beneath you, where children died because mothers forgot to check the latch. How did you keep your child safe in that kind of world?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“​She'd never understood people calling their children delicious, but she got it now, she wanted to find him so she could eat him up, inhale him right back into her body so she would never lose him again.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“He was almost six, that tender age when the baby plumpness starts to melt away from children's bodies and you can see, in their newly angular faces, the people they might become.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“You Only Live Once. That's what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered MORE because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and contents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“​It felt as though someone had reached into him and was wresting out his heart. In later life his sorrows would be deep-drawn and bone-aching sad, but never like this. Perhaps only the young can feel such exquisitely intense pain.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“I long to stretch out on the sofa, wrapping myself in the red quilt that's lying there. Then, with a stab, I recognize the quilt. My father had brought it back from a business trip he took to New England long ago. Ironic, how objects remain in your life long after people have exited.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“After that, somehow, I began fixing things in my life. Dr Berger says being close to death will do that, but I'm not sure catalysts of change can be so easily identified.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“I guess that's when people call their mothers - when their world is falling apart.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“What is the nature of life?
Life is lines of dominoes falling.
One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“​Life... is full of compromises you never thought you'd make when you were young.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“...you get to an age when your attachments are so solidly stacked around you, like the bookshelves that reach to the ceiling in the lounge, and they are so built into the fabric of your life that compromise seems nothing next to their dismantling.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“​...she wonders if it isn't genetic - the whole personal tidiness thing. One is destined to become one's mother, after all. This thought makes her smile to herself - there are worse things.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed, yet still she took tea when it was proffered, for the symbolism, she supposed - solicitude, comfort, warmth. It is the English way, after all.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Her eyes red-rimmed, now brimming, her forehead furrowed with disbelief and anger. There is nothing worse than seeing your mother cry and being the cause.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you're least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter