Ginny > Ginny's Quotes

“I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. When one's hostess starts in with self-deprecations such as "Oh, I don't know how to cook...," or "Poor little me...," or "This may taste awful...," it is so dreadful to have to reassure her that everything is delicious and fine, whether it is or not. Besides, such admissions only draw attention to one's shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings), and make the other person think, "Yes, you're right, this really is an awful meal!" Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed -- eh bien, tant pis! Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile -- and learn from her mistakes.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.”
― W.C. Fields

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
― Julia Child

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
― Jane Goodall

“When all is said and done, more is said than done.”
― Lou Holtz

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
― George Herman Ruth

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”
― Claude Monet

“1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5) When you can't create you can work.
6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9) Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10) Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11) Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”
― Henry Miller

“Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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

“Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.”
― Craig Claiborne

“I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen”
― Rita Rudner

“There ain't a body, be it mouse or man, that ain't made better by a little soup.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

“in the abstract art of cooking,
ingredients trump appliances,
passion supersedes expertise,
creativity triumphs over technique,
spontaneity inspires invention,
and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious.”
― Bob Blumer

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein