Emily Bach Quotes

“The sisters' voices were almost identical, laughing mezzos tuned in childhood to the same pitch and timbre. To the ear, they were twins; to the eye, nothing alike. Emily was tall and slender with her hair cropped short. She wore a pinstriped suit, elegant slacks, tiny, expensive glasses. She was an MBA, not a programmer, and it showed. Magnified by her glasses, her hazel eyes were clever, guarded, and also extremely beautiful. Her features were delicate, her fingers long and tapered. She scarcely allowed her back to touch her chair, while Jess curled up with her legs tucked under her. Jess was small and whimsical. Her face and mouth were wider than Emily's, her cheeks rounder, her eyes greener and more generous. She had more of the sun and sea in her, more freckles, more gold in her brown hair. She would smile at anyone, and laugh and joke and sing. She wore jeans and sweaters from Mars Mercantile, and her hair... who knew when she'd cut it last?”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Everyone expected Emily to take care and take charge. It had always been this way. When her mother was sick, she'd filled out her own permission slips for school. When Jess signed up to bring home the kindergarten rabbit for the weekend, Emily took care of it. 'Look at Emily taking care of her sister,' her New Jersey aunts said to one another after the memorial service. There were no relatives from England. Her English grandparents had died before Emily was born, but the New Jersey aunts were full of admiration. 'What an angel. Look how good she is,' her father's sisters said. Emily knew she was not an angel, but the more she doubted, the better she behaved.
At work she was the peacemaker. She wasn't just the chief executive officer of the company; she was the adult when her partners behaved like children.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Richard had sold Gillian's piano. He'd offered to ship it out to California, but neither Jess nor Emily played. Emily had quit her lessons at "Streets of Laredo" and Jess only got as far as "The Teddy Bears' Picnic." They had Gillian's jewelry, but she hadn't collected much. She had never liked necklaces or earrings. In fact, she'd never pierced her ears. She'd preferred a rosebush or two for her birthday, or a standing mixer.
"This is very sticky dough," she would tell Emily as she rolled it out. "It's very difficult to work with this dough, because it's so short. You see?" She dusted the rolling pin and board with more flour and rolled briskly, as if to tame the stiff pastry, which she then cut into circles with an overturned teacup, or filled with honeyed poppy seeds, or spread into a glass pan to bake a cake with luscious prunes, their sweetness undercut with lemon. Nothing too sweet. That was the secret. Gillian said as much to Emily in her "Sixteenth Birthday" letter. 'Don't doctor recipes. More is less, and sugar will only get you so far.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Orion was the one Emily knew well. He had been Emily's childhood friend when, for several summers, they attended CTY, the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins. At eleven, twelve, and thirteen, they took courses in physics and advanced geometry along with other children selected nationwide. Emily had studied Greek, and Orion took astronomy. Renaissance children, they lived in dorms with other earnest middle-schoolers blowing through problem sets, practicing violin, gathering several times a week for camp games designated by their counselors as "mandatory fun.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there's money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn't you go out and paint?”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan's frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice- that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang "Greensleeves" in the dark, and she'd asked: "Why are you singing 'Greensleeves' when my nightgown is blue?" Then Gillian had changed the song to "Bluesleeves," and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss- because of it- Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector