Top 100 Ruth Reichl Quotes
#1. Thank you American Library Association for naming The Gluten-Free Revolution one of the "Top 10 Food Books of 2014" Thrilled to share this honor with Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, et al
Jax Peters Lowell
#2. When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.
Kate Christensen
#3. That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.
Ruth Reichl
#4. If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.
Ruth Reichl
#5. I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.
Ruth Reichl
#6. Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.
Ruth Reichl
#7. When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.
Ruth Reichl
#8. That's what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.
Ruth Reichl
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The way we allow children to be advertised to is shocking. Eating is a learned behavior, and we've made these kids sitting ducks for all the bad messages about industrialized food. The fact that we allow that to go on is horrifying.
Ruth Reichl
#13. 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
#14. I don't think there's one thing more important you can do for your kids than have family dinner.
Ruth Reichl
#15. 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
#16. Giving people presents is such an intimate act; you're basically telling them who you think they are,
Ruth Reichl
#17. It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.
Ruth Reichl
#19. I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.
Ruth Reichl
#20. 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
#21. It takes a great deal of strength to be an optimist.
Ruth Reichl
#22. 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
#23. The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.
Ruth Reichl
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.
Ruth Reichl
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Change works both ways. You must accept those moments, experience them, and let them go. Because if you allow yourself to get stuck in that minute, nothing will ever change.
Ruth Reichl
#30. One of the effects of cheap food is, we have food that is so unsatisfactory. We need to go back to flavor.
Ruth Reichl
#31. We're in a transient state - why hate our present selves? Let's save the energy for when we are eighty, when we are perhaps above, or beyond, changing. Then we can hate, if hate we must.
Ruth Reichl
#32. My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim.
Ruth Reichl
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Don't you just love the idea of cooking flowers? I imagine them bursting into bloom, right in the pan.
Ruth Reichl
#37. I am telling you that if things can change for the worse, the opposite is also true. But only if you open yourself to the possibilities.
Ruth Reichl
#38. I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.
Ruth Reichl
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.
Ruth Reichl
#42. 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
#43. I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.
Ruth Reichl
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. It was so rich and exotic I was seduced into taking one bite and then another as I tried to chase the flavors back to their source.
Ruth Reichl
#47. 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
#48. It was Mac who first made me think about the way food brought people together - and kept them apart.
Ruth Reichl
#49. It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.
Ruth Reichl
#50. Hermione was back, holding out a gossamer dress of rainbow chiffon so airy I thought of fireflies on a moonlight night.
Ruth Reichl
#51. We slid along water reds and greens, the changing lights captured in the canvas of wet tar.
Ruth Reichl
#52. When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.
Ruth Reichl
#53. People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they're going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they'll be over the moon.
Ruth Reichl
#54. 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
#55. My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.
Ruth Reichl
#56. I'd rather be a fool than hard-hearted.
Ruth Reichl
#57. 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
#58. I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.
Ruth Reichl
#59. I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.
Ruth Reichl
#60. Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.
Ruth Reichl
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I loved being at the 'Times,' and they were incredibly good to me. I think it's a wonderful paper, and I was really well edited.
Ruth Reichl
#66. '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
#67. The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I'm interested in happiness.
Ruth Reichl
#68. That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault. Lulu
Ruth Reichl
#69. And he smiled when he saw me, as if just the sight of me had improved his day.
Ruth Reichl
#70. In really good times, you say, 'No, I'm not taking that ad.' But in bad times, you'll take anything.
Ruth Reichl
#71. The first time you make something, follow the recipe, then figure out how to tailor it to your own tastes.
Ruth Reichl
#72. Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.
Ruth Reichl
#73. If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.
Ruth Reichl
#74. 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
#75. I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.
Ruth Reichl
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.
Ruth Reichl
#80. If you're going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff.
Ruth Reichl
#81. 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
#82. Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.
Ruth Reichl
#83. I love breakfast, and I don't see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast.
Ruth Reichl
#84. One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.
Ruth Reichl
#85. 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
#86. I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.
Ruth Reichl
#87. What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.
Ruth Reichl
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. My kitchen was built for my body. It forms a 'U' in the middle of the living room and dining room. It's not huge, because I don't like huge kitchens.
Ruth Reichl
#92. 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
#93. What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.
Ruth Reichl
#94. The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.
Ruth Reichl
#95. Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.
Ruth Reichl
#96. 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
#97. I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.
Ruth Reichl
#98. Plain fresh bread, its crust shatteringly crisp. Sweet cold butter. There is magic in the way they come together in your mouth to make a single perfect bite.
Ruth Reichl
#99. When I came to 'Gourmet,' I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing.
Ruth Reichl
#100. 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
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