Julie Powell

“Mas o cinismo persistente deixa uma pessoa rabugenta e, em demasia, pode provocar estragos duradouros no nosso coração.”

“Ma o cinismo persistente deixa uma pessoa rabugenta e, em demasia, pode provocar estragos duradouros no nosso coração.”

“Kiedy nie wierzy się niebo, śmierć jest stuprocentowym Końcem. Choć to śliczna myśl, nie wierzę, że Julia je w raju Sole Meunière z Paulem. Wierzę, że jej ciało zostało pogrzebane - pod bardzo fajnym nagrobkiem, nawiasem mówiąc, ciekawe, czy zgadniecie, jakie ma epitafium - a mózg, serce, poczucie humoru i doświadczenie, które sprawiły, że to ciało było Julią, znikły. Wszystko, co zostało, znajduje się w naszych wspomnieniach. Ale to też jakieś życie pozagrobowe, prawda? (...) Kiedy byłam w liceum, miałam wyjątkowo przykrego nauczyciela aktorstwa. (...) Już umarł i żyje w mojej pamięci, ale jako wredny, manipulujący, nieszczęśliwy sukinsyn. To kiepski sposób na spędzenie wieczności. Z Julią jest inaczej. Zamiast snuć się po jakimś niewydarzonym niebie, zastanawiając się skąd skombinować prawdziwą solę z Dover, chodzi po komnatach mojego mózgu, zatrzaskuje z rozmachem porządny, mocny piekarnik, pije wino i bawi się jak jasna cholera. Ma swoje zwyczaje, bywa uparta jak muł, ale już nie klaruje masła, bo uznała, że to zawracanie głowy, więc ciągle się uczy. A ponieważ dałam jej miejsce, w którym może bywać, uznała, że jednak nie jestem taką zarozumiałą suką i nawet fajna ze mnie kobitka. Przynajmniej tak uważa Julia z mojej głowy. Istnieją tysiące tysięcy Julii w umysłach ludzi z całego świata, ale ta Julia jest moja.”

“Bo czasami ma się takie uczucie, kiedy widzi się, jak ktoś się zakochuje - może zwłaszcza w przypadku kogoś smutnego, trudnego lub z jakiegoś innego powodu niedopasowanego do świata. Uczucie ulgi, prawdziwej, jakbyś mogła pozbyć się ciężaru, który niosłaś, nie zdając sobie z tego sprawy. Tak się właśnie czułam, patrząc na ślub Isabel i Martina. "No, przynajmniej ta sprawa z głowy". Dwoje ludzi, którzy mogli się nie odnaleźć. Wydawało się, że to coś cennego i delikatnego.”

“I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility.”

“Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy.”

“Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart... It's sad, but a relief as well to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.”

“I felt like a Jane Austen heroine all of a sudden, confusedly looking on at all the people she loves, their myriad unpredictable couplings and uncouplings. There would be no marriages at the end of this Austen novel, though, no happy endings, no endings at all. Just jokes and friendships and romances and delicious declarations of independence.”

“You know that dejection that comes upon you when you realize that the person you're talking to might as well be from Jupiter, for all the chance you have of making them get what you're saying? I hate that.”

“There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance.”

“Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It's not what I thought it was. I thought it wa all about-I don't know, confidence or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there's something else, somethng that these things grow out of. It's joy.”

“So the end may be a long time coming, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a way of sneaking up on you.”

“There are times with your friends when you just have to put their whole mess out of your mind for a while.”

“The nice thing about having a friend who is crazier than you are is that she bolsters your belief in your own sanity.”

“For stalker food, Martha Stewart is the woman to go to.”

“Unfortunately, Martha's recipes, though suitably complex, fall a tad short if you're looking for aphrodisiac cooking, perhaps only because everything about a Martha recipe, from the font it's printed in to the call for sanding sugar, with appended notes on where to find such a thing, simply screams Martha. ”

“If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is.”

“Two years ago, I was a twenty-nine year old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one year old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me -- I certainly would.”

“Maybe I needed to make like a potato, winnow myself down, be part of something that was not easy, just simple.”

“I took a bite of lobster meat with rice. It was quite tasty. 'Arguing the morality of slaughter will send you into a tailspin of self-loathing every time.' 'Unless you're a vegan.' 'Uh-huh. But then you're a vegan and you don't count.”

“Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else - not as fragile as we think they are.”

“And I realized that, for this night at least, I didn't much care if anyone was the marrying kind or not - not even me. Who could tell? We none of us knew for sure WHAT kind we were, exactly, but as long as were the kind that could sit around eating together and having a lovely time, that was enough.”

“Doors are going to open-doors you can't even imagine exist.”

“A new enterprise awaits. It hangs before you like fruit on a tree.”

“Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and an Internet connection can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be.”

“But hard bitten cynicism leaves one feeling peevish, and too much of it can do lasting damage to your heart.”

“... I began to ponder; this life we had for ourselves, Eric and I, it felt like the opposite of Potage Parmentier. It was easy enough to keep on with the soul-sucking jobs; at least it saved having to make a choice. But how much longer could I take such an easy life? Quicksand was easy. Hell, death was easy. Maybe that's why my synapses had started snapping at the sight of potatoes and leeks in the Korean deli. Maybe that was what was plucking deep down in my belly whenever I thought of Julia Child's book. Maybe I needed to make like a potato, winnow myself down, be a part of something that was not easy, just simple.”

“I never really even tried. But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep. Oh Godm it really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary.”

“It's all about the "French Paradox," that much-publicized puzzle of how French people eat all that fatty food and drink tons of wine, yet still manage to be svelte and sophisticated, not to mention cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

“These are the times when we aficionados of the gas stove know we are on the side of God.”

“The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons.”

“When I got home I peered down at the lobster to see how he was doing. The inner plastic bag was sucked tight around him and clouded up. It looked like something out of an eighties made-for-TV movie, with some washed-up actress taking too many pills and trying to off herself with a Macy's bag.”

“Without the Project I was nothing but a secretary on a road to nowhere, drifting toward frosted hair and menthol addiction.”

“One theory on cannibals, of course, is that they eat parts of their slain enemies to benefit from that person's greatest assets - their strength, their courage. Then there’s that thing they do in Germany. You heard about that, didn’t you? Some man over there agreed to let another man cut off his penis, cook it, then feed it to him – now, what in hell was that all about? What did he think the taste of his stir-fried cock would tell him about himself? Was he seeking to wring one last drop of pleasure out of the thing? (Goodness, that’s an unnecessarily vivid metaphor.) But somehow – I said this over dinner – this steak with beef marrow sauce, it didn’t seem that different. “It’s like eating life. It’s almost like eating my own life, you know?”No, not really. But it’s a hell of a good steak, sis.”

“My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty: 'When the flood comes/ I will swim to a symphony/ go by boat to some picture show/ and maybe I will forget about you.' How did he know way, way back then? How is it I know only now?”

“I love my husband like a pig loves shit.”

“The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes”

“Fiddling with damp tarragon left me so intensely irritated that when I was done I had to stick the ramekin/mise en place bowls back in the fridge and go watch both the episode where Xander is possessed by a demon and the one where Giles regresses to his outrageously sexy teen self and has sex with Buffy’s mom, just to get over it.”

“I have never looked to religion for comfort - belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking - childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting - I thought this was what prayer must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want. Reading MtAoFC was like reading pornographic Bible verses.”

“Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.”

“If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.”

“But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress.”

“It was only once I was in the car ... that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming "Fuck!" in primal syncopation, were (1) I'd be embarrassed and (2) I didn't want to get my cute vintage suit any dirtier than it already was. Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill, those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy. ”