Sayings About The Dinner Table

#1. Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.

Carl Honore

#2. THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF GASTRONOMY
There's a rule for proper doses
in the dinner-eaters lore:
one should stop the filling process
while one still has room for more.
And if someone at the table
had reminded me before -
Hallelujah! I'd be able
to absorb a little more.

Piet Hein

#3. I could stand on my head and flick the bean right there at the dinner table and my mom would be all, "Honey, Christmas is family time, we should be together" and make me finish in front of everyone.

Christopher Moore

#4. I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.

Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey

#5. Think beyond the vase! If you have a vase of flowers on a dining table for a quick dinner party, think about scattering flower petals, leaves, or even fruit along the tabletop.

Clinton Smith

#6. It was easy to be nice to an attractive woman over a dinner table. The despair came later, with children and tiredness and the sheer drudgery of marriage and monogamy.

Nick Hornby

#7. Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.

Richard Whately

#8. I rushed us out of your parents' house because I didn't think I could manage two hours at the dinner table with everyone focused on Joe Loosey's joystick sitting in the refrigerator next to the applesauce.

Janet Evanovich

#9. Star salt (the stars' reflection in a river) Sun cradle (the sea) Lemon kiss (everyone knew exactly what this meant!) Family anchor (the dinner table)

Nina George

#10. MY TOUGHEST MATCH; is not on the mat. It's at the dinner table and it's at fast food restaurants. It's hearing about the party I can Never go to. It's realizing being a Great Wrestler isn't a sport, It's a LIFE.

Stephen Neal

#11. The smaller the dinner table, the better the side conversation: you can gossip about the guests without fearing whether you will be overheard. It just isn't good table manners to exclude someone from their own ridicule. That's why the juiciest side conversations occur at a table for one.

Bauvard

#12. Right now it's just me and my impatience having a silent war at the dinner table.

Colleen Hoover

#13. As your older brother, it's my sacred duty to save you from yourself."
She brings her fists down on the table, making all the dinner plates jump. "The ONLY reason you're fifteen minutes older than me is because you cut in front of the line, as usual!

Neal Shusterman

#14. I think if we all acted the way we felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.

Jim Carrey

#15. If you want something beautiful to put on the dinner table, pick up a sockeye, the salmon species with the most vivid red flesh.

Tom Douglas

#16. The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.

Angela Carter

#17. I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.

Christopher Buckley

#18. New York is like a big dinner party. You have to be very careful about what you say and do because you never know whose feet are touching under the table.

Susanna Moore

#19. Comedy has always been important in my family. If you got in a good joke at the dinner table, it meant more than almost anything else.

Isla Fisher

#20. It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

Junot Diaz

#21. Every single day we sit down to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and at our table we have food that was planted, picked, or harvested by a farm worker. Why is it that the people who do the most sacred work in our nation are the most oppressed, the most exploited?

Dolores Huerta

#22. Sunny likes me, Mama, she had said that night at dinner after he'd been sent from the table for making his napkin into a hand puppet and refusing to make the hand puppet be quiet.

Anna Quindlen

#23. Now, suddenly, I was the kind of girl who felt true physical pain when asked to put down a book at the dinner table, who asked friends over and ignored them to finish Island of the Blue Dolphins for the fifth time.

Lizzie Skurnick

#24. There is, if you don't mind my saying so, something sinister about men who avoid wine, games, the company of charming women, and good dinner-table conversation. People like that are either seriously ill or they secretly disdain their fellow men.

Mikhail Bulgakov

#25. I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

Lorrie Moore

#26. Every Thanksgiving, we all write down three things we're thankful for and put them in a hat. Then we pass the hat around the dinner table and everyone has to guess who wrote what!

Debby Ryan

#27. Be nice to his family. Pretend not to notice the way their house smells. Pretend to like their food. Mimic their barbaric customs at the dinner table.

Laura Yes Yes

#28. You think like a boxer and behave like a boxer, and you try to live your life that way, being in the gym all the time and being careful to push the plate away at the dinner table. You don't need dessert. When you're out having fun, you ask for agua instead of vodka. It's very important.

Holt McCallany

#29. I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we're all the same.

Brene Brown

#30. Growing up, around the dinner table my father and I didn't talk sports. We talked business.

Jared Kushner

#31. The hardest exercise for most of us fat people is that one where we push our chairback from the dinner table.

Dolly Parton

#32. At your next dinner party, try playing the following game. Challenge everyone around the table to produce a single drug that can cure people of an illness, other then antibiotics. If you come up with anything, stop whatever you are doing and call me.

Lynne McTaggart

#33. The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.

Judith Martin

#34. My folks are economists and have taught economics and social science so I grew up with those kind of conversations around the dinner table.

Seth Gordon

#35. English tradition debars from dinner-table conversation almost all topics that might interest the conversers and insists upon strict adherence to banalities.

Elspeth Huxley

#36. I didn't grow up in a traditional family, and I never had a family dinner around the table, so whenever I actually had a dinner 'plan,' it meant a lot to me; it made me feel excited and safe.

Drew Barrymore

#37. I serve dinner in three phases: serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead.

Phyllis Diller

#38. The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.

Michael J. Fox

#39. Not to psychologize, but it's hard growing up in a family of 14 to ever feel like you're the center of the universe, or that you're that special or different. Because when it comes down to it, you're still fighting for food at the dinner table.

Ronan Farrow

#40. I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings. I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms.

Nicholas Sparks

#41. You have absolutely no idea what I need," I whispered. "And the sad part about that is that you didn't notice you'd already given me everything I'd ever need just letting me sit at your dinner table with your family." And on that, I closed and locked the door.

Kristen Ashley

#42. All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.

Tom Perrotta

#43. And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

Jonathan Franzen

#44. All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

#45. Luxury lives in the finer details. It's a cloth napkin at a dinner table. It's a mint on your pillow before bed.

Iggy Azalea

#46. It's a wonderful time when you sit down around the table for dinner and discuss life. No matter where you are, it gives the semblance of normalcy to my crazy world.

Melina Kanakaredes

#47. Other dads actually sat at the dinner table. Mine left me a fifty and a reminder to do my goddamn katas.

Lilith Saintcrow

#48. You know as well as I do that life has a way of clearing that path for you. And maybe the good Lord above has dropped two hundred pounds of gorgeous path-clearing answer out there at our dinner table for you.
-Taryn about Mike

Tina Reber

#49. There are a lot of funny people in my family. Absolutely. There were a lot of jokes growing up around the dinner table, for sure. We didn't grow up in a creative family.

Nate Corddry

#50. Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference.

Hugh Newell Jacobsen

#51. I don't know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children's happiness. Group crying, he could stand, but group laughing was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.

David Sedaris

#52. Things it is not polite to discuss at the dinner table: politics, religion, and the walking dead.

Mira Grant

#53. My material is as new as anything on the dinner table. What difference does it make if I'm 70 or if I'm 20? The audience knows they aren't getting any old stories from me.

Jackie Mason

#54. I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.

Robert Webb

#55. We were never the family that ordered pizza, and my mom never came home with a bucket of fried chicken. My mom always made home-cooked meals. We always sat down at the dinner table as a family.

Haylie Duff

#56. My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills.

Jack Dangermond

#57. There is a list of things I'm not allowed to discuss at the dinner table! I am extraordinarily passionate about the Black Death, which is not something most people are into.

Seanan McGuire

#58. My parents were the traditional Filipino parents who didn't talk about money around the dinner table.

Bo Sanchez

#59. Friend, we are well met indeed. I think we are a pair of fools and that we should hasten to Nildren's Peak, where I shall buy ye such a dinner as even your great frame will find sufficient. And then we shall see who can drink the other under the table. Is that good by ye?

Ian Livingstone

#60. Every lesson I learned as a kid was at the dinner table. Being Greek, Sicilian and Ruthenian - we are an emotional bunch. It is where we laughed, cried and yelled - but most importantly, where we bonded and connected.

Michael Symon

#61. I knew though," he said.

"Knew what?" she asked, leaning forward a bit while she crossed her ankles together under the table.

"When I woke up this morning, I knew that I would be having dinner with you tonight," he replied.

Emilia Winters

#62. When this is all over I'm going to found an association called 'The Knights of the Idiotic Table' and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You're all members.

Stieg Larsson

#63. Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.

Paul Fussell

#64. Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.

Pat Conroy

#65. That's not what I mean, and you know it. Have we ever been on a real date? You know, a dinner of more than buffalo wings and a pitcher of beer while you blow me from under the table?"

~Creed

Sydney Croft

#66. Be able to blow out a dinner candle without sending wax flying across the table.

Marilyn Vos Savant

#67. Of course he was there, a removed audience
of my redemption songs from beyond the grave,
the way Kafka and his father continued to shadow-box,
long after they quit staring at each other
at the dinner table.

Thabo Jijana

#68. I had a friend whose family had dinner together every day. The mother would tuck you in at night and make breakfast in the morning. It just seemed so amazing to me.

Moon Unit Zappa

#69. My parents never condescended to me. As a child, I always sat at the head of our dinner table. I was always given a lot of responsibility.

Claire Danes

#70. We sat together as a family for dinner at night. And my mother had a job. My dad had a job. But there was always a meal on the table at 6:00, you know.

Trisha Yearwood

#71. There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.

Madeleine L'Engle

#72. LINUS: Where are you going for Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown?
CHARLIE: My father, my mother, Sally, and I are all going to my grandmothers for dinner.
SALLY: Do you want to come too, Linus? We can hold hands under the table.
LINUS: BLECH!

Charles M. Schulz

#73. If you're a working mom, you're still expected to be a super-mom at home, buy organic food, put dinner on the table every night, and do all the research into preschools. It's really hard.

Joe Swanberg

#74. One of the pleasures of staying with friends is that you get to browse their shelves. I always arrive with a book, but I almost never read it. It would be like sitting at their dinner table and opening a packet of sandwiches.

Simon Hoggart

#75. The dinner table is a lively debate, and everybody weighs in in a different way. I like that, though.

Vanessa Kerry

#76. Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time-worn coat, and how savory the dinner-table can be made without sirloin steaks and cranberry tarts.

Edmund Morris

#77. When the waitress puts the dinner on the table, the old men look at the dinner. The young men look at the waitress.

Gelett Burgess

#78. It's the sense of what family is at the dinner table. It was the joy of knowing mother was in the kitchen making our favorite dish. I wish more people would do this and recall the joy of life.

Paul Prudhomme

#79. I grew up in a show biz family and, if you wanted to talk at the dinner table, you'd better be prepared to talk about film.

John Orloff

#80. The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who 'graze' from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.

Judith Martin

#81. Sitting down for dinner not only helps you learn, but also teaches you how to listen - which I feel is the most important skill to have. I remember as a kid going around the table listening to everyone's day. It was hard to have the manners not to interrupt back then.

Michael Symon

#82. We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyday things: at the dinner table, in the kitchen, washing dishes, grocery-shopping, commuting. These things make up the fabric of our lives.

Annia Ciezadlo

#83. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

S.I. Hayakawa

#84. Poor, darling fellow - he died of food. He was killed by the dinner table.

Diana Vreeland

#85. I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.

Michael Pollan

#86. To address our current food system problems, I propose a series of local, regional, national and global conversations - starting around the dinner table - to rethink the food we produce, buy and eat.

Ellen Gustafson

#87. Author describes one monarch's impressive table but conveys a contemporary's observation, "the weightiest thing at dinner was the conversation".

Peter Heather

#88. Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.

Bob Ehrlich

#89. [On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

Elsa Maxwell

#90. Cooking is a caring and nurturing act. It's kind of the ultimate gift for someone, to cook for them. It creates all this beautiful stuff, conversation, appreciation, romance. All the most important things in life you do around a dinner table.

Curtis Stone

#91. The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#92. I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

Nicole Krauss

#93. Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

Mary Stuart Masterson

#94. When we lay awake after making love I could hear the sleepy birds settling in their nests in the thatch. We had a little pallet bed, a table and two stools, a fireplace where we warmed up our dinner from the palace, and nothing more. We wanted nothing more.

Philippa Gregory

#95. Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.

A.C. Grayling

#96. Somewhere after the dinner was served and before the cake was cut, Isabella lost Ben. Everyone at their table was up dancing and mingling. Isabella sat there and drank wine. She felt like a fool.

Jennifer Close

#97. We are not passing values on to our children. We are not sitting down at the dinner table talking about the tiny things that add up to caring human beings.

Letitia Baldrige

#98. Those moments at the dinner table, I felt as Sveta were teaching me something important: that I didn't need to make every opinion known, didn't need to be filterless, that sometimes the best thing was to sit quietly and smile and sip my wine.

Molly Antopol

#99. Does she say tough cookies?" "Well, no," I confess. "Nana swears like a sailor, actually. Last Christmas she dropped a motherfucker bomb at the dinner table, and my dad nearly choked on his turkey.

Elle Kennedy

#100. My father was a news guy, you know, he was in radio news. And so that was sort of in my DNA. It was something we talked about at the dinner table when I was a kid.

Bill Maher