Kate Christensen Quotes

Even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice.

If you‘ve got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.

Reminded of what a diet really is, I began eating more slowly, being more conscious of when I was full. I started to enjoy my buckwheat bread with goat cheese and pureed butternut-squash soup as a response to real hunger.

A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.

My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I’ve lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I’ve lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.

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

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.

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

It’s really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.

My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved tomato-based, celery-heavy Manhattan chowders.

Even more than dying itself, I’m scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.

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.

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

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

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.

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 never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.

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

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.

In a family of all girls, I was always the ‘boy‘ in my mind – the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.

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

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

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.

Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.

When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.

As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.

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.

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

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.

After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths.

Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I’m a snob, it’s about quality, not cuisine.

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.

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 remember the moment I first became aware of aging. I was 30. I looked down at my knees, and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, ‘And so it begins!’

If I fell into one relationship after another with men who were either emotionally tuned out and unavailable or hotheaded and controlling, or both, it was because I was lacking in good sense about men.

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?

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

I procrastinate all morning. That’s when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what’s on the Internet and do laundry.

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

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.

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

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.

Iggy Pop has a voice that’s somehow simultaneously self-mocking, wild, precise, amused, righteous, cool, contained and bold. I don’t know how he does what he does.

I started reading G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday‘ on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.

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.