“The constant desire to win is a very American kind of trouble. Less glamorous gains made along the way--learning, wisdom, growth, and confidence, dealing with failure--aren't given the same respect because they can't be given a grade.”

“Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.”

“Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.”

“It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.”

“There's real trouble in the world. The kind that can't be fixed. The kind we lie awake keeping vigil against. Love is not trouble. It's all we have to light our days, to bring music to the time we've been given.”

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way”