69 Quotes by Julie Powell

It’s all about the “French Paradox,” that much-publicized puzzle of how French people eat all that fatty food and drink tons of wine, yet still manage to be svelte and sophisticated, not to mention cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

These are the times when we aficionados of the gas stove know we are on the side of God.

I never really even tried. But if I’m not a New York actress, what am I? I’m a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep. Oh Godm it really was true, wasn’t it? I really was a secretary.

Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else – not as fragile as we think they are.

So the end may be a long time coming, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a way of sneaking up on you.

The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons.

For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don’t know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for.

The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that “simple” is not exactly the same as easy.

You know that dejection that comes upon you when you realize that the person you’re talking to might as well be from Jupiter, for all the chance you have of making them get what you’re saying? I hate that.