Quotes from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Each person's heart breaks in it's own way. Every cure will be different, but there are some things we all need. Before anything else, we need to feel safe.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Life is beautiful. Some people just remind you of that more than others.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“I used to know a sculptor... He always said that if you looked hard enough, you could see where each person carried his soul in his body. It sounds crazy, but when you saw his sculptures, it made sense. I think the same is true with those we love... Our bodies carry our memories of them, in our muscles, in our skin, in our bones. My children are right here." She pointed to the inside curve of her elbow. "Where I held them when they were babies. Even if there comes a time when I don't know who they are anymore. I believe I will feel them here.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“I am starting to think that maybe memories are like this dessert. I eat it, and it becomes a part of me, whether I remember it later or not.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“The name for the cocoa tree is theobroma, which means "food of the gods." I know that chocolate is meant for us, however, because the melting point for good chocolate just happens to be the temperature within your very human mouth.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Sometimes, niña, our greatest gifts grow from what we are not given.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“If you live in your sense, slowly, with attention, if you use your eyes and your fingertips and your taste buds, then romance is something you’ll never need a greeting card to make you remember.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“We are all just ingredients, Tom What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Being around her, he found even every day experiences were deeper, nuanced. Satisfaction and awareness slipped in between the layers of life like love notes hidden in the pages of a textbook.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“I've been wondering," Isabelle commented reflectively over dessert, "if it is foolish to make new memories when you know you are going to lose them.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“When she realized that there are many kinds of love and not all of them are obvious. That some wait like presents in the back of the closet until you are able to open them.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Every time we prepare food we interrupt a life cycle. We pull up a carrot or kill a crab- or maybe just stop the mold that's growing on a wedge of cheese. We make meals with those ingredients and in doing so we give life to something else. It's a basic equation and if we pretend it doesn't exist, we're likely to miss the other important lesson which is to give respect to both sides of the equation.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“They walked back to the chopping block, Claire carrying the crab in her hands. Helen paused. "You know, I'd like to ask you something a friend asked me once, if you don't think it's too personal."

"What is it?"

"What do you do that makes you happy? Just you?"

Claire looked at Helen for a moment and thought, the crab resting on the block beneath her hands.

"I was just wondering," Helen continued. "No one ever asked me when I was your age, and I think it's a good thing to think about."

Claire nodded. Then she took the cleaver and cut the crab into ten pieces.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Isabelle had always thought of her mind as a garden, a magical place to play as a child, when the grown-ups were having conversations and she was expected to listen politely-- and even, although she hated to admit this, later with Edward, her husband, when listening to the particularities of his carpet salesmanship wore her thin. Every year the garden grew larger, the paths longer and more complicated. Meadows of memories.

Of course, her mental garden hadn't always been well tended. There were the years when the children were young, fast-moving periods when life flew by without time for the roots of deep reflection, and yet she knew memories were created whether one pondered them or not. She had always considered that one of the luxuries of growing older would be the chance to wander through the garden that had grown while she wasn't looking. She would sit on a bench and let her mind take every path, tend every moment she hadn't paid attention to, appreciate the juxtaposition of the one memory against another.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“When a couple came to class together, it meant something else entirely - food as a solution, a diversion, or, occasionally, a playground.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“While the egg yolks cooled, he directed the beaters at the egg whites, setting the mixer on high speed that sent small bubbles giggling to the side of the bowl, where a few became many until they were a white froth rising up and then lying down again in patters and ridges, leaving an intricate design like the ribs of a leaf in the wake of the beaters”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Lillian sometimes wondered why psychologists focused so much on a couple’s life in their bedroom. You could learn everything about a couple just watching their kitchen choreography as they prepared dinner.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“I loved to walk in her garden after dinner; it felt alive, even in the winter. She always told me that rosemary grows in the garden of a strong woman. Hers were like trees.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“It was like trying to teach subtlety to a thunderstorm.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Maybe your mind won't remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“If you live in your senses, slowly, with attention, if you use your eyes and your fingertips and your taste buds, then romance is something you’ll never need a greeting card to make you remember.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“I used to know a sculptor," Isabella said, nodding. "He always said that if you looked hard enough, you could see where each person carried his soul in his body. It sounds crazy, but when you saw his sculptures, it made sense. I think the same is true with those we love," she explained. "Our bodies carry our memories of them, in our muscles, in our skin, in our bones. My children are right here." She pointed to the inside curve of her elbow. "Where I held them when they were babies. Even if there comes a time when I don't know who they are anymore, I believe I will feel them here.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“What did she do that made her happy? The question implied action, a conscious purpose. She did many things in a day, and many things made her happy, but that, Claire could tell, wasn’t the issue. Nor the only one, Claire realized. Because in order to consciously do something that made you happy, you’d have to know who you were. Trying to figure that out these days was like fishing on a lake on a moonless night—you had no idea what you would get.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“She became a frame for the picture that was her son and daughter.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“The more she cooked, the more she began to view spices as carriers of the emotions and memories of the places they were originally from and all those they had traveled through over the years.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“And that night she dreamed in French.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“You know, Ian,” Antonia commented, “my father always said a person needs a reason to leave and a reason to go. But I think sometimes the reason to go is so big, it fills you so much, that you don’t even think of why you are leaving, you just do.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“When it was mixed together, the salsa was a celebration of red and white and green, cool and fresh and alive. On a tortilla, with a bit of crumbled white 'queso fresco,' it was both satisfying and invigorating, full of textures and adventures, like childhood held in your hand.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Helen found ways to sneak summer into the dark months of the year, canning and freezing the fruit off their trees in July and August and using it extravagantly throughout the winter- apple chutney with the Thanksgiving turkey, raspberry sauce across the top of a December pound cake, blueberries in January pancakes.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

“Lillian lifted the cake pans from the oven and rested them on metal racks on the counter. The layers rose level and smooth from the pans; the scent, tinged with vanilla, traveled across the room in soft, heavy waves, filling the space with whispers of other kitchens, other loves. The students food themselves leaning forward in their chairs to greet the smells and the memories that came with them. Breakfast cake baking on a snow day off from school, all the world on holiday. The sound of cookie sheets clanging against the metal oven racks. The bakery that was the reason to get up on cold, dark mornings; a croissant placed warm in a young woman's hand on her way to the job she never meant to have. Christmas, Valentine's, birthdays, flowing together, one cake after another, lit by eyes bright with love.”
― Erica Bauermeister, quote from The School of Essential Ingredients

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Popular quotes

“For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright

“Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!” it said. “I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!”
“You burn prettily,” I said.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Guns of Avalon

“As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the”
― quote from From Beirut to Jerusalem

“Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins.”
― Steven Johnson, quote from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

“But what was the right thing? Letting the show go on, as written? Or stepping in, hoping that I could—in a respectful way—point out how things could be different? It would be a mistake to remind producers what they already knew—that a TV series has an unspoken agreement with its audience to be what it has been from the beginning. A sitcom shouldn’t become a drama. Nobody wants to see a homicide investigation on Mr. Belvedere. (On Murphy Brown, maybe.) A show about a middle-class suburban family shouldn’t suddenly focus on illegal immigrants and their struggle to cross the border. My inner voice kept reminding me that I was just a kid, while the producers were authority figures—albeit odd authority figures. As a child actor, I had learned early that I wielded more power than most adults, yet my parents instilled within me a respect and a desire to submit to authority. My parents never put up with the typical child-star behavior.”
― Kirk Cameron, quote from Still Growing: An Autobiography

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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