Top 35 Julie Powell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You can never have too much butter.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

4. “At the end I am always alone.”

— Julie Powell

5. “I love that after a day when nothing is sure, and when I say ‘nothing’ I mean nothing, you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.”

— Julie Powell

6. “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.”

— Julie Powell

7. “The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer.”

— Julie Powell

8. “Cooking saved my life! Sure, there were some miserable moments, but that was sort of the point, to find something challenging and consuming enough to take a place in the center of my life into which was creeping a horrible feeling of stasis and the doom of mediocrity.”

— Julie Powell

9. “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.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

12. “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.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

15. “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.”

— Julie Powell

16. “Physically it’s exhausting to cook every night. Existentially speaking, I have so much more energy having that time to myself in this project, this gift to myself at the end of the day. Even if it didn’t go smoothly, it was still a gift.”

— Julie Powell

17. “The crunch of the mustard-spiked crust somehow brings the unctuous smooth richness of the liver into sharp relief. It’s like the silky soul of steak. You have to close your eyes, let the meat melt on your tongue, into your corpuscles.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

19. “I got my undergrad in Creative Writing, and then I didn’t get my Masters in obsession, because I figured I already had that covered.”

— Julie Powell

20. “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.”

— Julie Powell

21. “It’s sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence.”

— Julie Powell

22. “Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you’ve got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

24. “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.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

27. “It was 10:30 in the morning and I was already running behind. This is hardly unusual, but it pisses me off every single time.”

— Julie Powell

28. “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.”

— Julie Powell

29. “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.”

— Julie Powell

30. “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.”

— Julie Powell

31. “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.”

— Julie Powell

32. “We were moving because Eric’s office had moved there, and commutes from Bay Ridge to Long Island City uncomfortably reminded us of Latin American immigrants knifed to death by bigots in subway cars en route to one of their three jobs at two in the morning.”

— Julie Powell

33. “Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual.”

— Julie Powell

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

— Julie Powell

35. “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.”

— Julie Powell

36. “It did not seem possible, much as he craved the comfort of a woman of intelligence, of humor and balance and perception.”

— Julie Powell

37. “The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that “simple” is not exactly the same as easy.”

— Julie Powell

38. “For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don’t know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for.”

— Julie Powell

39. “Last night I had a dream that I was about halfway up a sheer cliff, endlessly high. Up ahead of me was, it seemed, everyone I’d ever known – the guys at the shop, my family, Gwen, Eric, D – and they were pulling ahead, climbing fast, leaving me behind. I tried to call out but found I had no voice, that my words slurred and died in my mouth, that I could not be heard. I awoke with a terrified lurch, unable to scream. I have this dream all the time.”

— Julie Powell