Top 50 Kate Christensen Quotes

It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It’s nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.

It’s interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn’t. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?

My youngest sister belonged to a group called the Twelve Tribes for many years. She recently left, with her husband and four children. Talking to her about her experiences in the group is fascinating, moving, and enlightening.

My father’s grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.

I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically.

There are two kinds of ham: raw and cooked. Raw ham is cured with salt and/or smoke over time; cooked ham is boiled. Every culture that makes ham has its own unique and various methods.

‘Blue Plate Special’ is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.

I’ve cooked plenty of meals when I was sad, lonely, depressed, angry, bored, and/or under the weather. My primary aim in these circumstances is generally to cheer myself up, to fill my stomach with something warm so I can feel comforted and fed, usually just with a quick soup or an omelet.

Ham is undoubtedly one of the most universally beloved of meats, at least in those parts of the world where it’s not prohibited.

Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.

Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike, stalky vegetable.

In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless.

I have observed, through many years of living in north Brooklyn, that people, for example an ostensible group of friends, can be dangerous to one another.

Food is not a means toward resolution. It can’t cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.

Broccoli, when overboiled, produces a sulfuric stench that causes children to gag the instant they enter the house.

In literature, older women are not often given center stage.

It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true – to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.

Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.

Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.

Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.

Across the Atlantic, in the scattered, far-flung, rural settlements of colonial America, hospitality had become a central concern, and hostesses, like peacocks displaying their iridescent plumage, tried to outdo one another with their creative food displays.

I wanted to write a food book, but I’m not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.

My blog is a celebration of the unexpected, settled, happy life I find myself living in Portland, Maine, at the ripe old age of fifty with someone I deeply love and am very happy with. That’s part of why I started the blog.

‘American Music’ is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.

After my experiences with the 5:2 diet, I wasn’t interested in a short-term fix that would fail later. I wanted a way of eating that made me lose weight without feeling deprived.

Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn’t have to make conversation.

Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn’t figure in European history until 1493.

I think there’s a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it’s really powerful. I think I’m not alone in this.

Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven’t developed or haven’t expressed.

The phrase ‘blue plate special’ has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.

There’s a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour.

Now that I’m 50 and respectably settled in New England and markedly happier and more contented than I was in my youth, I modestly hope there’s time to realize some of my youthful goals before I croak, but I’ll take what I can get.

On Halloween, kids get to assume, for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they’re also allowed to take candy from strangers – the scariest thing of all.

I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.

I’ve always written about adultery because it raises the question of transgression and trouble.

In the case of the cashew, someone, somewhere, a long time ago determined that it had to be roasted. The cashew was once nicknamed the blister nut, because if you try to eat it raw from the tree, your mouth pays the price. The cashew is not a nut, however; it’s a seed.

Loser lit antiheroes aren’t well intentioned or earnest; they don’t care whether you like them or not. They’re self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.

David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.

Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.

Famously cancer fighting, laden with vitamins, minerals, soluble fiber, and phytonutrients, broccoli and its relatives are among the healthiest ingredients of the human diet.

Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.

My first novel, ‘In the Drink,’ begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.

Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it’s important to wait, because once it’s picked, it can’t ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous.

With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.

To eat passionately is to allow the world in.

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer’s life – other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.

I don’t feel that I’ve had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional.

It’s hard for me to generalize about kids and divorce. I think every family’s experience is different; some kids are devastated by it, others relieved, and so forth, no matter what generation they’re from.

I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I’ve written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that’s that.

The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration?