Allegra Goodman > Quotes

“How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“People ask every day, "Why was I put on earth?" As if there is perhaps one reason. The truth is that there are too many reasons to count, and each reason and each soul connects to every other,”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“I myself was now an island. Solitary. Brambles and five-petalled flowers were my garden. Rocks my furniture. Ocean waves my lessons. Sadness overwhelmed me and sank back. Then, like the tide, joy crept in on me again.”
― Allegra Goodman, Isola

“A peach, slightly unbalanced, so that it listed to one side, its hue the color of an early sunrise. Had George remembered their conversation at the party and left the peach for her to eat? Strange. For a moment she thought it might be a trompe l'oeil work of art, some fantastic piece of glass. She leaned over and sniffed. The blooming perfume was unmistakable. She touched it with the tip of her finger. The peach was not quite ripe, but it was real.
The next day, she checked the kitchen as soon as she arrived. The peach lay there still, blushing deeper in the window light. She bent to smell, and the perfume was headier then before, a scent of meadows and summers home from school. Still unripe. Was George waiting to eat this beauty?”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Though experience should be our guide . . . and we see mistakes are common at the age of twenty-three, it must be acknowledged that not every youthful feeling begins unworthily and ends in error. If this were the case, mankind would have perished long ago.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Prophecy is a poetry of change, social, political, moral, spiritual. It was with the prophetic model in mind that Shelley wrote of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
― Allegra Goodman

“Women hate each other in science. You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.”
― Allegra Goodman, Intuition: A Novel

“He draws asparagus and cabbages, but he's obsessed with artichokes. He draws them more than any other vegetable. Why artichokes?"
George drained his glass. "The artichoke is a sexy beast. Thorns to cut you, leaves to peel, lighter and lighter as you strip away the outer layers, until you reach the soft heart's core.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“The new one actually reads, but only to pass judgment. This is the way kids learn today. Someone told them how you feel is more important than what you know, and so they think accusations are ideas. This is political correction run amok.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Leaving this changeling for George, she washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she'd ever know, that what was sweet could also be so complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“We've got an acquisitive gene. We want and want, and there's no way around it.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“I prefer feeling insignificant," said Jess.
"I don't believe that."
"I didn't say worthless, I said insignificant, as in the grand scheme of things."
"But why?"
"Because humans have such a complex. We're so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is."
And Jess was right. Numbers didn't matter here. Money didn't count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air.
Jess said, "All your worries fade away, because..."
Emily finished her thought. "The trees put everything in perspective.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Jeanne’s sisters thought nothing of themselves.... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers....

Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch.”
― Allegra Goodman, Apple Cake

“I want to give back.” He looked at her and said in all seriousness, “Why? What did you take?”
― Allegra Goodman, The Chalk Artist

“Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. "You could buy a farm."
"Why would I do that?"
"To be healthy," said Jess.
Emily shook her head. "I don't think I'd be a very good farmer."
"You could have other people farm your farm for you," said Jess. "And you could just eat all the good things."
Emily laughed. "That's what we're doing here at the Farmers' Market. We're paying farmers to farm for us. You've just invented agriculture."
"Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth."
"I think that's called a vacation," said Emily.
"Oh, you're too boring to be rich," Jess said. "And I would be so talented!”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“I have a dark sense of humor,' Fanny explained.

'What's that supposed to mean?' asked Honor.

'It means I'm funny once you get to know me,' Fanny said.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Other Side of the Island

“To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“As I have said, my daughter, no matter what virtue and goodness you see in yourself or others, know that in this world, not one in a thousand escapes without some deception or attack on her honor, no matter how good or perfect.”
― Allegra Goodman, Isola

“I wept for joy because I could escape, and for sorrow I must leave alone.”
― Allegra Goodman, Isola

“I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark…”
― Allegra Goodman, Isola

“The roses bloomed, thousands of them in a floral amphitheater, blossoms shading from gold and coral at the top of the garden to scarlet and deep pink on tiers below. At the bottom, in the center of the rosy congregation, the palest apricots and ivories perfumed the air.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“I used to write poetry when I was younger," Jess said. She had kept a notebook by her bed, in case some line or image came to her in her dreams, but she had always been a sound sleeper, and no Xanadus or nightingales woke her. She read Coleridge or Keats and felt that they had covered the great subjects so well that she had nothing to add about beauty, or immortality of the soul. "Now I just read."
She spoke cheerfully, without a hint of wistfulness. She was indignant sometimes, but never wistful. Opinionated, but still hopeful in her opinions. Oh, Jess, George thought, no one has hurt you yet.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Who are you? She asked silently, as she laid away the collector's quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: "Come live with me and be my love..." interleaved with menus: 'oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb.' The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“She had applied to college without her parents' knowledge, and when she got her choral scholarship she broke from childhood, choosing music as her religion.
Emily and Jess pressed him, but they didn't understand. Their mother's life began when she came up to Cambridge on her own. "It's like a fairyland here," she used to say, when they walked through the ancient cloisters. She was a quiet rebel, buying a Liberty-dress pattern and sewing her own gown for the Emmanuel College ball, dancing until dawn, and then slipping barefoot onto the velvet lawns reserved for Fellows. As a soprano she sang for services and feasts. As an adventurer, she tried champagne for the first time and pork loin and frog's legs.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Like the birds, Auguste and I slept in open air. Gratefully we rested without enemies, and looking up at the dark sky, we counted ourselves rich in stars.”
― Allegra Goodman, Isola

“You did that. Nobody else.”
― Allegra Goodman, Sam

“Reading was like visiting distant friends.”
― Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls: A Novel

“Yorick's Used and Rare Books had a small storefront on Channing but a deep interior shaded by tall bookcases crammed with history, poetry, theology, antiquated anthologies. There was no open wall space to hang the framed prints for sale, so Hogarth's scenes of lust, pride, and debauchery leaned rakishly against piles of novels, folk tales, and literary theory. In the back room these piles were so tall and dusty that they took on a geological air, rising like stalagmites. Jess often felt her workplace was a secret mine or quarry where she could pry crystals from crevices and sweep precious jewels straight off the floor.
As she tended crowded shelves, she opened one volume and then another, turning pages on the history of gardens, perusing Edna St. Vincent Millay: "We were very tired, were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry..." dipping into Gibbon: "The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay..." and old translations of Grimm's Fairy Tales: "They walked the whole day over meadows, fields, and stony places. And when it rained, the little sister said, 'Heaven and our hearts are weeping together...”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“The wines were great, and better by the minute, even as the drinkers softened. Just as wines opened at the table, so the friends' thirst changed. Their tongues were not so keen, but curled, delighted, as the wines deepened. Nick's Latour was a classic Bordeaux, perfumed with black currant and cedar, perfectly balanced, never overpowering, too genteel to call attention to itself, but too splendid to ignore. Raj's Petrus, like Raj himself, more flamboyant, flashier, riper, ravishing the tongue. And then the Californian, which was in some ways richest, and in others most ethereal. George was sure the scent was eucalyptus in this Heitz, the flavor creamy with just a touch of mint, so that he could imagine the groves of silvery trees. The Heitz was smooth and silky, meltingly soft, perhaps best suited to George's tournedos, seared outside, succulent and pink within, juices running, mixing with the young potatoes and tangy green beans crisp enough to snap.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Filling these packets and wood boxes, I felt a joy I had not known before. It was not love, and it was not comfort, nor was it mastery or beauty, but it was usefulness.”
― Allegra Goodman, Isola