Nora Ephron > Quotes

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”
― Nora Ephron

“What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.”
― Nora Ephron

“I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
― Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
― Nora Ephron

“When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.”
― Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women."

[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996]”
― Nora Ephron

“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”
― Nora Ephron

“The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.”
― Nora Ephron

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted
most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.”
― Nora Ephron

“I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.”
― Nora Ephron

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.
- You've Got Mail”
― Nora Ephron

“Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?”
― Nora Ephron

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.”
― Nora Ephron

“There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
― Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

“Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”
So I told her why.
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book
is one of the main reasons I read;
but it doesn't happen every time
or even every other time,
and when it does happen,
I am truly beside myself.

”
― Nora Ephron

“Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”
― Nora Ephron

“I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron

“In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. ”
― Nora Ephron

“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino." - Joe Fox”
― Nora Ephron

“There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.”
― Nora Ephron