Molly Wizenberg > Quotes

“I hate the notion of a secret recipe. Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared - that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed. To stop a recipe in it's tracks, to label it "secret" just seems mean.”
― Molly Wizenberg

“Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things...but what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.”
― Molly WIzenberg

“To most people, I guess, turning twenty-one is all about booze. To me, turning twenty-one was all about coconut. Booze is nice, but coconut is chewable, and when push comes to shove, I will always like eating better than drinking. Everyone has their priorities.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit,”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“The stars in the night sky are a long way from the surface of the earth, so even the nearest seem to move little, if at all. They appear to be fixed against the firmament from day to day and year to year, permitting us to think them into shapes and symbols. But astronomers know that every star is in motion, that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties. The constellations we see are temporary creations, our effort to draw order and meaning from a mostly unknowable universe, to tell ourselves stories, to guide our way home across oceans.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“How often, in everyday conversation, had I said things I didn’t mean or feel, just to be polite, to make things easier? How often had I said to Brandon what I thought I should say in order to maintain order, to repair a rift? We had never been good at disagreement. One of us always gave in when it got too uncomfortable. One of us would recognize that we were at a dead end, would begin to back out. We rarely paved a road through to the other side. We rarely stuck with it long enough to forge any kind of new, if painful, understanding.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Do not marry someone who will not go to therapy, both on their own and with you. Refusing to go to therapy with your partner is like looking the other way when they're drowning.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“My husband and I would be separate people, as I envisioned it. We would be as important individually as we were together, as a couple. We'd be discrete entities with our own histories, energy, and motion, but we'd be bound to each other like stars in a constellation: a union born by the force of imagination and emotion, by the curious work of the human mind.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Even the Thanksgiving when her parents had just divorced, Hoosier Pie made the cut. ...They also, incidentally, made a pumpkin pie, but it fell on the floor, a classic example of survival of the fittest”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“How could this kind of contentment coexist with the mess in my head? How could this love coexist with the desire for a whole other love? Shouldn't they cancel each other out? I had watched my husband and child sleep, choked with feeling. I wanted to press a woman against a wall with the length of my body--a woman who looks like a boy--and fuck her. Does one life preclude another? I wanted both. Two lives in this body. Running alongside each other in parallel, like ski tracks.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things. I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board. I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter. I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate. But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that’s what we’re often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“The square pizza at Di Fara is a complex, multi-step thing: a 1/2-inch-thick crust pressed out into a pan, topped with a long-simmered San Marzano tomato sauce, slices of fresh mozzarella cut from a fist-sized ball, slices of aged mozzarella, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano that he feeds through a hand-cranked grater as he goes, plenty of olive oil poured from a copper jug, and fresh herbs snipped with scissors. It’s sort of like focaccia—focaccia that oozes so much cheese and tomato that you need a knife, a fork, and three napkins to eat it.”
― Molly Wizenberg, Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

“it’s hard to love someone, I’ve found, when you’re preoccupied with holding your entire world firmly in place. Loving someone requires a certain amount of malleability, a willingness to be pulled along, at least occasionally, by another person’s will.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“I think that what it all comes down to is winning hearts and minds. Underneath everything else, all the plans and goals and hopes, that's why we get up in the morning, why we believe, why we try, why we bake chocolate cakes. That's the best we can ever hope to do: to win hearts and minds, to love and be loved.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“When someone dies, we tend to tell the same stories over and over: the happy ones, or the funny ones, or, at the very least, the poignant ones. We turn those stories this way and that, studying them like diamonds or ancient scrolls, taking note of every detail. We don’t tell the sad stories, or the ugly, warted ones. After a while, they fade like old newsprint, and we start to forget.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“While I sobbed into the greens, I wondered how Brandon, standing a few feet away at the pizza oven, could handle the onslaught of tickets. Answer: he's an East Coaster. In a pinch, he has access to such concepts as 'Fuck 'em', and 'Let 'em wait', and 'I'm working as fast as I can here.' I am a people-pleaser from Oklahoma, where life is placid enough that it's considered song-worthy to watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky.”
― Molly Wizenberg, Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

“My father had coats the way old spinsters have cats.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“There's no time like the present to start eating chocolate with your greens.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“When I cannot watch her, I think about watching her. I think all the time about it.
I leave the house each morning with my thermos of coffee, thinking. I walk down our street, turn the corner, walk a few more blocks, and board the bus, thinking. One morning mid-trial I catch the headline of a fellow bus rider's newspaper: the Supreme Court had ruled on Obergefell vs. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal across the United States. I choke back a sob, elated, disbelieving. Then I want to cry for a different reason, and I cannot tell anyone why. I think about her wrists and her white teeth. I wonder what she thinks about me.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Don't let socializing get between you and a platter of deviled eggs.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“If a man can’t build a violin, he might as well make pizzas in a former violin shop.”
― Molly Wizenberg, Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

“Why make things complicated when it's hard enough to do simple things well. 159”
― Molly Wizenberg, Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

“But new soul, old soul, if the me of twenty-five years ago could see what’s in my freezer right now, she would scream. Lurking within its icy depths are no fewer than six ripe bananas, hard and frosty-skinned, lying in wait like small, shriveled snakes. It’s like a stockpile of tropical fruit terror. And what’s more, I love it. Growing up really is great.”
― Molly Wizenberg

“Both women and men who deviate from the born-this-way model have historically been presumed to be exceptions and weirdos.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Of course: under gender we find the bare thing, the person themself.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Diamond's writing is often impassioned, and I liked it. I felt set on fire by it, elated by not only the affirmation of her feelings but by their specificity.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“What is left if we eliminate orientation—or if it changes willy-nilly? Is there anything solid to me at all, anything I can count on?”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“hell hath no fury like a woman starved.”
― Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

“She walked the line between man and woman, smudged it under her foot.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars