Food Quotes

Maybe I should have got some chili-slaw dogs from Shorty’s. Everybody loves those.” “Buddy,” Lars said, dropping his shoes to the deck with a thump, “sit yourself down and stop fussing. You’re reminding me of my Aunt Glynna with all this temperature takin’ and foil tuckin’. This food is fine.

~ Mary Jane Hathaway

I have a bad feeling about this,” she said. “We’ll fake it. And if push comes to shove, we can just sing Goober Peas and waltz around.” “Rebecca might not find that very funny.” “Rebecca is a Northerner. You can tell because there aren’t any cheese straws on the snack table.

~ Mary Jane Hathaway

Troy sat down next to Sherri, examining her tray. Are you going to eat that? he asked. I know what went in there. He smiled, looking mysterious. Troy's mother worked in the cafeteria.Sherri immediately dropped the turkey roll.

~ Amy Lapalme

But what little we did know, we brandished wildly like cavemen’s clubs, slinging out stuff we felt tasted good. That was as intricate as ourgame plan ever was—to make food that tasted good.

~ Bjorn Shen

We don't come to the table to fight or to defend. We don't come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel.

~ Shauna Niequist

Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world -- this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world -- no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness.

~ Shauna Niequist

He had to be nice to me at the moment because he had to be surrounded by people. This was because boys like him were, essentially, pasta. Everyone thought they loved him because they had never been forced to experience the true blandness of him on his own.

~ Matthew Crow

Cooking is not a science but an art, mistakes are okay, messes are fine—the pleasure is in the creating and the sharing of the result.

~ Lori Pollan

No matter our age, everyone in our household knows that cooking and eating together is where the fun is

~ Corky Pollan

Many a one has been comforted in their sorrow by seeing a good dish come upon the table.

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

It's the soul that's starving, not the body

~ Shoshana Kobrin

I still have my little red hardcover notebook—spine now held in place by packing tape, pages dotted with cooking stains—filled with her loving instructions for mandelbrot, nut cake, and strudel.

~ Lori Pollan

Nana’s oven-baked fried chicken cut off the bone (with plenty of ketchup) was a huge hit. So were Thanksgiving turkey bathed in gravy and Nana’s Passover brisket

~ Dana Pollan

The German birds didn't taste as good as their French cousins, nor did the frozen Dutch chickens we bought in the local supermarkets. The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.

~ Julia Child

When you eat with awareness, you find that there is more space, more beauty. You begin to watch yourself, to see yourself, and you notice how clumsy you are or how accurate you are…When you practice awareness, everything becomes majestic and good. You begin to see that you have been leading a different kind of life in the past. You had the essence of mindfulness already, but you hadn’t discovered it.

~ Chögyam Trungpa

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

~ Sylvia Plath

I would follow my mother around the kitchen watching and trying to find any way to help. One of the first dishes my mother taught me to make was hollandaise sauce. Though she always served it with broccoli, I soon realized it was equally delicious with asparagus, artichokes, or any other vegetable.

~ Tracy Pollan

What is this food in my head, anyway? Let’s see...it’s green and good for you and so delicious. It’s prepared by angels with love. The minute you bite into it, it’s savory, chewy, nourishing, and whole- some. You feel instantly revitalized. A small, tiny amount, just a few bites, rejuvenates every cell, deepens your breath, clears your mind, heals your wounds, and mends your heart. It’s made from joyous plants that voluntarily separate themselves from their stalks, laying themselves at the feet of the approaching gardener who gathers them. They eagerly offer their vital energies to nourish living spirits. The angels in their chef hats, singing mantras, cook it tenderly to retain all the benefits of the generous plants. It’s barely sweet, barely salty, and contains all the freshness of spring herbs, summer fruit, spreading leaves, and burgeoning seeds. It comes premade in bags or boxes...you just open it up, sit down, and enjoy. It’s a full meal, enough maybe for a whole day, maybe for a week, maybe for your family, maybe for your friends and neighbors. It multiplies like loaves and fishes, in little biodegradable containers that vaporize instantly the moment you finish them, without any greenhouse emissions. Nothing to clean up!

~ Kimber Simpkins

There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Jennifer Anne had prepared some complicated-looking recipe involving chicken breasts stuffed with sweet potatoes topped with a vegetable glaze. They looked perfect, but it was the kind of dish where you just knew someone had to have been pawing at your food for a long while to get it just right, their fingers all in what now you were having to stick in your mouth.

~ Sarah Dessen

One time, I went to a restaurant and I asked the waiter for some food for thought. He left, came back, and tried shoving a sirloin in my ear.

~ Travis J. Dahnke

A burnt and experienced hands are more important than the vessels in the kitchen.

~ Nikita Dudani

How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it.

~ Laurie Notaro

My mother use to say she would rather be dead than not eat the foods she liked. At eighty-six she met with death but she enjoyed every breath

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

A natural person can achieve right diet because his instinct is in proper working order. He is satisfied with simple food; it is nutritious, tastes good, and is useful daily medicine. Food and the human spirit are united.

~ Fukuoka

The foods that are nearby are best for human beings, and things that he has to struggle to obtain turn out to be the least beneficial of all.

~ Fukuoka

Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of political vegetarians. We have no idea what plants, animals, or soil eat, or how much. Which means we have no idea what we ourselves are eating.

~ Lierre Keith

Eating a burrito is like eating a living, breathing organism - you can feel the burrito's ingredients sigh inside with each bite, each squeeze.

~ Gustavo Arellano

Is it possible we love and rely on food more than we love and rely on God?

~ Lysa Terkeurst

Peasants are people without sense or forethought. Therefore, they must not give rice to their wives and children at harvest time, but must save food for the future. They should eat millet, vegetables, and other coarse food instead of rice. Even the fallen leaves of plants should be saved as food against famine.

~ Keian No Ofuregaki

There are neither raptures, nor ecstasies, nor transports of bliss in the pleasures of the table; but they make up in duration what they lose in intensity, and are distinguished above all by the merit of inclining us towards all the other pleasures of life, or at least of consoling us for the loss of them.

~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

When life gives you lemons, sell them and buy a pineapple. How to better your life 101.

~ Davin Turney

They say you should treat your body like a temple. I treat mine like a fast-moving dumpster.

~ Matthew Inman

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

~ W.h. Auden

You know what I really love the most in life? Food. Yep, just food. I love the cooking of food, the eating of food, the talking about food, the thinking about food, and the dreaming about food. Food, food, food. That’s what I love. Can there be anything more Hobbity than that? I reckon not.

~ Steve Bivans

Variety in your diet is health in your life.

~ Toni Sorenson

Malnutrition can be as common in poverty as in wealth, one for the lack of food, the other for the lack of knowledge of food.

~ T.k. Naliaka

In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.

~ Marcella Hazan

I’d eat a picnic in Hades with him.

~ Kristen Ashley

Maybe your mind won't remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.

~ Erica Bauermeister