Top 100 Ruth Reichl Quotes
#2. I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.
Ruth Reichl
#3. To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.
Ruth Reichl
#4. And he smiled when he saw me, as if just the sight of me had improved his day.
Ruth Reichl
#5. That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault. Lulu
Ruth Reichl
#6. 'Comfort Me with Apples' is a love story, or better, two love stories. And since it deals with a later period in my life, most of the people who appear in it are living.
Ruth Reichl
#7. When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.
Ruth Reichl
#8. I don't have my own garden; we're on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.
Ruth Reichl
#9. If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.
Ruth Reichl
#10. I got back into the car thinking how lucky I was to be aware of happiness. Most people don't recognize their own good fortune until it has departed. And then it is too late." "What about Remy? What
Ruth Reichl
#11. My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.
Ruth Reichl
#12. I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.
Ruth Reichl
#13. I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.
Ruth Reichl
#14. Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'
Ruth Reichl
#15. I'd rather be a fool than hard-hearted.
Ruth Reichl
#16. My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.
Ruth Reichl
#17. A real woman is someone who knows what she wants. If you want to stay home, that's fine, but you have to be clear-eyed.
Ruth Reichl
#18. I love to make pies - pot pies, quiches, savory tarts, fruit pies. I use an old-fashioned pastry blender with wires and a wooden handle. I never use a recipe.
Ruth Reichl
#19. I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.
Ruth Reichl
#20. I think it's hard, when you're someone who likes to please people, as I am, to be a boss. I had to learn how to rein myself in and not terrify people.
Ruth Reichl
#21. The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.
Ruth Reichl
#22. I felt for the first time that the library belonged here. The house was reclaiming its spirit, and the library, which had stood aloof and apart for so many years, was turning back into what it was always meant to be: the heart of this home.
Ruth Reichl
#23. There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.
Ruth Reichl
#24. Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.
Ruth Reichl
#25. If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.
Ruth Reichl
#26. What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.
Ruth Reichl
#27. I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.
Ruth Reichl
#28. The implications of Americans devoting their lives to fast food are more profound than the fact that our kids aren't eating well. There are real repercussions that we need to know about and think about.
Ruth Reichl
#29. One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.
Ruth Reichl
#30. I love breakfast, and I don't see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast.
Ruth Reichl
#31. We were having a class on civics, talking about what makes America a great country. I said I thought one important reason is that we've all come from different places in the world and that we learn from one another.
Ruth Reichl
#32. I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.
Ruth Reichl
#33. Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane.
Ruth Reichl
#34. She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.
Ruth Reichl
#35. Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.
Ruth Reichl
#36. My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.
Ruth Reichl
#37. I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.
Ruth Reichl
#38. American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.
Ruth Reichl
#39. It takes a great deal of strength to be an optimist.
Ruth Reichl
#40. By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
Ruth Reichl
#41. I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.
Ruth Reichl
#43. It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.
Ruth Reichl
#44. Giving people presents is such an intimate act; you're basically telling them who you think they are,
Ruth Reichl
#45. For me, cooking is a way to try and please people and tell them I love them. When I fall in love with someone, I want to feed them as well.
Ruth Reichl
#46. I don't think there's one thing more important you can do for your kids than have family dinner.
Ruth Reichl
#47. I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
Ruth Reichl
#48. The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.
Ruth Reichl
#49. The thing I like most in my kitchen is my marble counters. Everybody said not to use marble because it's fragile, it stains, it cracks, and it doesn't remain beautiful. But I love marble.
Ruth Reichl
#50. If you start with a great peach, there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.
Ruth Reichl
#51. That's what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.
Ruth Reichl
#52. When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.
Ruth Reichl
#53. Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.
Ruth Reichl
#54. I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.
Ruth Reichl
#55. That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.
Ruth Reichl
#56. I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.
Ruth Reichl
#57. We slid along water reds and greens, the changing lights captured in the canvas of wet tar.
Ruth Reichl
#58. Hermione was back, holding out a gossamer dress of rainbow chiffon so airy I thought of fireflies on a moonlight night.
Ruth Reichl
#59. It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.
Ruth Reichl
#60. What I learned is that how we present ourselves to the world is really how we get treated. So if you want to be treated really well in a restaurant, you really have to dress up. You cannot just show up.
Ruth Reichl
#61. In the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, ... it is never too late to find out how to do it.
Ruth Reichl
#62. Any soul who has survived to the age of eighty - two with nary a secret would be extremely dull. I, for one, would have very little interest in making their acquaintance.
Ruth Reichl
#63. You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.
Ruth Reichl
#64. But when I told her they didn't cost one penny and were very nutritious (I made that part up, but I'm sure it must be true), she ate them up. She packed them into her lunch pail this morning, and when I looked
Ruth Reichl
#65. I discovered that endings have their own odd thrill. In the mania of the moment, it's possible to forget what you are losing.
Ruth Reichl
#66. You mean like you?" The old enmity had come roaring back, and she was no longer one of my bosses. She gave a shout of laughter. "Well, you're right, it's been a rotten time. I've been catering, which is just another way of saying that I've been in hell." "That bad?" Richard took a bite
Ruth Reichl
#67. My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.
Ruth Reichl
#68. I was not prepared for the feel of the noodles in my mouth, or the purity of the taste. I had been in Japan for almost a month, but I had never experiences anything like this. The noodles quivered as if they were alive, and leapt into my mouth where they vibrated as if playing inaudible music.
Ruth Reichl
#69. My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim.
Ruth Reichl
#70. One of the effects of cheap food is, we have food that is so unsatisfactory. We need to go back to flavor.
Ruth Reichl
#71. One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my father wished I was.
Ruth Reichl
#72. I wasn't exactly known for self-confidence, but I could taste the cake in my mind. Strong. Earthy. Fragrant. I remembered the nose-prickling aroma of cinnamon when it comes in fragile curls, and the startling power of crushed cloves.
Ruth Reichl
#73. We in the media have been guilty about not doing a better job of making people understand how really simple cooking is. We've made everyone feel like they have to be a chef.
Ruth Reichl
#74. A great meal is an experience that nourishes more than your body.
Ruth Reichl
#75. I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad.
Ruth Reichl
#76. There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.
Ruth Reichl
#77. I like to work. I believe that work helps us find our self worth.
Ruth Reichl
#78. The strands of spaghetti were vital, almost alive in my mouth, and the olive oil was singing with flavor. It was hard to imagine that four simple ingredients [olive oil, pasta, garlic and cheese] could marry so perfectly.
Ruth Reichl
#79. I meet people, and we can get past small talk pretty quickly if they've read my books. It's a great shortcut.
Ruth Reichl
#80. I feel as if there's a huge gulf separating me from all the lucky people in the world; they have so much to look forward to.
Ruth Reichl
#81. Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.
Ruth Reichl
#82. But I have always been persuaded that someday, when I grow up, I am destined for great things. And then I wonder when, exactly, I expect that will be.
Ruth Reichl
#83. What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.
Ruth Reichl
#84. The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.
Ruth Reichl
#85. When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.
Ruth Reichl
#86. I've been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it's very deliberate: There's this idea that somehow it's more fun if there's a roar in the room.
Ruth Reichl
#87. Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.
Ruth Reichl
#88. When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.
Ruth Reichl
#89. I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.
Ruth Reichl
#90. I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.
Ruth Reichl
#91. What does happen in 'Gourmet,' we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, 'Taste!' and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish.
Ruth Reichl
#92. I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.
Ruth Reichl
#93. I decided that it wasn't pretty that I felt, but confident.
Ruth Reichl
#94. I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'
Ruth Reichl
#95. Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.
Ruth Reichl
#96. Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.
Ruth Reichl
#97. I felt that I was really living in the moment. I did not know where my life was going, but right now the future did not trouble me.
Ruth Reichl
#98. World War II really fascinated me because it's the only time that everybody in this country sat down at the same table, because eating on rations was your patriotic duty.
Ruth Reichl
#99. We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.
Ruth Reichl
#100. I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.
Ruth Reichl
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
