Amy > Amy's Quotes

“Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger's touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body.

But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am," and forms the core of personality.

In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And "I am" grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh.

The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves.

In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and fixes the facets of the soul, until "I am" is set, delicate and detailed as an insect in amber.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.”
― Iris Marion Young

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
― Charles de Gaulle

“Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.”
― Voltaire

“There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.”
― Robert Frost

“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

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

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

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates

“The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.”
― Julia Child

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

“Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.”
― Julia Child

“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
― E. M. Forster

“I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly