Quotes by Nora Ephron

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like Ive accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; its a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and its a way of making contact with someone elses imagination after a day thats all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didnt cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldnt cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, its Rachel Samstat, shes bright, shes funny and she can cook!

I remember thinking that no one had ever told me how much I would love my child; now, of course, I realized something else no one tells you: that a child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was.

My religion is Get Over It.

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend

Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that its entirely possible you will have another failure.

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and dont take it off until youre thirty-four.

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and cant tell which way is up. When he surfaces, hes liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body cant adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.

The next man I was involved with lived in Boston. He taught me to cook mushrooms. He taught me that if you heat the butter very hot and put just a very few mushrooms into the frying pan, they come out nice and brown and crispy, whereas if the butter is only moderately hot and you crowd the mushrooms, they get all mushy and wet. Every time I make mushrooms I think of him. There was another man in my life when I was younger who taught me to put sour cream into scrambled eggs, and since I never ever put sour cream into scrambled eggs I never really think of him at all.

I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didnt know how to do it.

I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be - feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half bad at being a woman.

The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.

Heres the thing about dessert--you want it to last. You want to savor it.

My parents had drinks and there were crudités for us- although they were not called crudités at the time, they were called carrots and celery.

The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.

Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.

I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills. I tell you this, so you will understand that my antipathy toward Love Story is not because I am immune to either sentimentality or garbage, two qualities the book possesses in abundance. When I read Love Story, and I cried, in much the same way that I cry from onions, involuntarily and with great irritation, I was deeply offended...

Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)