Dwight Garner > Quotes

“A cup of coffee carves out a parenthesis in the day. If you can learn to shrink the hours between the morning’s last cup and the evening’s first drink, you’ve taken a baby step toward enlightenment”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“box wines, which aren’t to be dismissed. Some wit on Twitter recently referred to them as “cardboardeaux.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“I walked out of a chic downtown Manhattan restaurant not long ago, with friends, before we’d ordered, because the music was so loud we were reduced to making hand signals. Four gestures I remember making (the extent of my sign language) were: “thumbs down,” “knife across throat,” “this is bullshit,” and “let’s get out of here.” The cacophony, increasingly, is the point. It’s a way to keep out the oldies, of which now, I suppose, we were. When I’m trapped in a restaurant that’s playing shitty songs at defenestrating volume, I think longingly of the house rules at St. John, Fergus Henderson’s restaurant in London: “No art. No music.” To crib a line from the poet William Matthews, the jukebox plays Marcel Marceau.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“You can't read an e-book in the tub. You can't fling one across the room, aiming as Mark Twain liked to do, at a cat. And e-books will not furnish a room.”
― Dwight Garner

“bottle of wine should be ordered, not glasses. “Part of the companionship of being lunch companions is that you should take your wine from the same bottle,” Waterhouse wrote. “It is, to be fanciful, as symbolic as breaking bread.” The bottle should remain on the table, never allowed to be placed out of reach in an ice bucket. A good lunch is an event in the life of our morale. What you want to do is eat with a friend who will revel in your gossip, and cap it with their own.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“A friend once told her that he had seen graffiti in a restaurant's men's room that read, "Gael Greene uses a thesaurus.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“I’ve never had a bad cup of coffee, in the same way I’ve never read a bad Lorrie Moore short story,”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“The critic R. P. Blackmur watched Edmund Wilson eat spaghetti and commented, “It was enough to make you lose your faith in human nature.” According to Joyce Carol Oates, it’s the most famous thing Blackmur ever said.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“Nora Ephron wrote that none of us should wait to have our “last meal.” Have it now, have it all the time, or you may end up in the ICU and your last meal will be institutional porridge.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“There's no verb for traveling while hopping from swimming pool to swimming pool. Perhaps "cheevering" would suffice.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading