“To most people, I guess, turning twenty-one is all about booze. To me, turning twenty-one was all about coconut. Booze is nice, but coconut is chewable, and when push comes to shove, I will always like eating better than drinking. Everyone has their priorities.”

“Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things...but what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.”

“I hate the notion of a secret recipe. Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared - that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed. To stop a recipe in it's tracks, to label it "secret" just seems mean.”

“Even the Thanksgiving when her parents had just divorced, Hoosier Pie made the cut. ...They also, incidentally, made a pumpkin pie, but it fell on the floor, a classic example of survival of the fittest”

“My father had coats the way old spinsters have cats.”

“Most of the people you read about being turned meet vamps in clubs or over the Internet...Ew, did you...?""Yes, I met a vampire on the Internet, went to his evil love den, and let him turn me, because I'm that brainless.”

“What can you do?" he asked.It took me a few seconds to catch up to Daddy's question. He was asking about my snazzy new vampire powers, not expressing helplessness about my being turned by a guy with "shoves trees on people" tendencies."Oh, um, a lot of stuff, except, you know, eat solid food and go outside during the day, " I said. "Even my pot pie?" Mama cried. Yes, because in this situation, pot pie was what we should be focusing on.”