Typhoid Mary Quotes

“The true instigator of social revolution was starvation.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical

“One finds oneself being defined by one’s job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“What did you do before there were drugs? Before there were antibiotics?  . . . You learned to sit on the bedside and hold the hand  . . . every once in a while you gave the person a hug.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“It’s not like the idea of washing your hands after visiting the bathroom was some goofy new theory.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“The new trash who’d suddenly come into money and liked to rub your nose into it? They didn’t care. They didn’t notice. Until one of their own goes ill. Then it’s a sodding emergency. Some privileged prat starts feeling poorly and then it’s call out the Marines, start looking for someone to blame”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“How do you instruct a woman who’s already survived incredible hardship, who’s worked hard all her life, on how to live ‘properly’, when your life is, by contrast, a carefree wonderland of excess, sloth and caprice?”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“In short, marriage, particularly for a woman, was about as much fun as a lingering illness.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“They’d been running households for years, of course – seeing to the finances, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and in general, doing all those things which men couldn’t, or more accurately, wouldn’t, do.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“The American woman’s interest does not lie in the man; she wants to be alone, and she can’t be alone without dabbling, today in chemistry, to-morrow in physiology and the day after in Buddhism.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“This sounds like positive social change, right? Anything the revs are against is surely a good thing. Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“She doesn’t try to have dignity or refinement. She wants to affect men by what she says, not what she doesn’t say.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“Middle-class women, like everybody else, were redefining their roles in society, redefining themselves – and having too good a time doing it for the reverend’s taste. Quiet, demure, compliant women – whose sole purpose in life had previously been to get married and raise kids and run a household for their husbands, however brutish those husbands might have been, were being replaced by brainy, assertive, cigarette-smoking, self-indulgent ‘new women’, for whom the twentieth century promised new pleasures and real choices.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“There is an undercurrent of almost hysterical glee in his descriptions of Mary as a menacing and infectious brute – as if by calling her dangerous and unstable he was mitigating his own failure and fears.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“Most jobs, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It’s a point of pride, working through pain and illness.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“You want to see emotional? Watch a table of ten’s order come back for a refire in a busy all-male kitchen in the middle of the rush. You’ve never seen such weeping and rending of garments and tantrum throwing since you smacked your little brother and took away his favorite stuffed toy.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“We know the names of the greats like divinity students know the names of the apostles: Point, Troisgros, Bocuse, Guerard, Robuchon, and so on  . . . We know their progeny, the ones who came after – who begot whom – and in which kitchens – and we are comforted by knowing the names. It puts our own lives, our own toil, in perspective – it reminds us that we are a part of something, cogs, however tiny, in a great machine whose wheels have been turning for centuries.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“I have known, at various low points in my long and checkered career, what it feels like when one’s pride in what one does – one’s love of cooking, one’s faith in one’s ability – begins to fade, and I know the kind of sloppiness that can follow. Fortunately, in my case, those days are long gone. I got a second chance. Mary never did.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“I went to Ithaca in 1903 when one person in ten was sick, and one person in a hundred was dying from the disease. You have no idea of the state of mind I found the people in. They didn’t know what to do; didn’t know where to go; didn’t know whom to suspect and whom to trust  . .”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“Unfortunately, when residents found that the one patient at the new place was black, they mobbed the place, set it on fire, and chased the patient and caretaker onto a boat.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary