Top 40 Laurie Colwin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.”

— Laurie Colwin

2. “Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures.”

— Laurie Colwin

3. “The sharing of food is the basis of social life.”

— Laurie Colwin

4. “The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: even the simplest food is a gift.”

— Laurie Colwin

5. “A person cooking is a person giving. Even the simplest food is a gift.”

— Laurie Colwin

6. “To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.”

— Laurie Colwin

7. “Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home.”

— Laurie Colwin

8. “And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.”

— Laurie Colwin

9. “It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age – that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.”

— Laurie Colwin

10. “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”

— Laurie Colwin

11. “There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.”

— Laurie Colwin

12. “For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.”

— Laurie Colwin

13. “A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.”

— Laurie Colwin

14. “The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.”

— Laurie Colwin

15. “We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living.”

— Laurie Colwin

16. “In this world of uncertainty and woe, one thing remains unchanged: Fresh, canned, pureed, dried, salted, sliced, and served with sugar and cream, or pressed into juice, the tomato is reliable, friendly, and delicious. We would be nothing without it.”

— Laurie Colwin

17. “Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed.”

— Laurie Colwin

18. “Lentils are friendly – the Miss Congeniality of the bean world.”

— Laurie Colwin

19. “Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.”

— Laurie Colwin

20. “I come from a coffee-loving family, and you can always tell when my sister and I have been around, because both of us collect all the dead coffee from everyone’s morning cup, pour it over ice, and drink it. This is a disgusting habit.”

— Laurie Colwin

21. “Their first actual kiss was a one-celled organism which, after they had been standing on the stairway kissing for some time, evolved into something rather grander – a bird of paradise, for example.”

— Laurie Colwin

22. “That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional.”

— Laurie Colwin

23. “Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.”

— Laurie Colwin

24. “I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato.”

— Laurie Colwin

25. “To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.”

— Laurie Colwin

26. “When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook’s strongest ally...”

— Laurie Colwin

27. “When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook’s strongest ally. I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over, I ate it cold the next day on bread.”

— Laurie Colwin

28. “I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.”

— Laurie Colwin

29. “Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.”

— Laurie Colwin

30. “Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.”

— Laurie Colwin

31. “Holly sat down, as if at home. But, Guido wondered, would she be happy where there were no trays?”

— Laurie Colwin

32. “I feel that weaving is a precise metaphor for the way in which life is made,” she said. “By which I mean individually constructed. Any strand can be woven in at the dictation of the imagination. I think of the philosophy of history as a loom of that sort. It is, isn’t it?”

— Laurie Colwin

33. “The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.”

— Laurie Colwin

34. “Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment.”

— Laurie Colwin

35. “Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.”

— Laurie Colwin

36. “I love the process of learning a thing. It’s doing a thing I find so boring.”

— Laurie Colwin

37. “No one who cooks cooks alone.”

— Laurie Colwin

38. “Most of his time appeared to be spent bumming cigarettes from people whose annual income was about a fifth of his own.”

— Laurie Colwin

39. “Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.”

— Laurie Colwin

40. “The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people.”

— Laurie Colwin

41. “In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.”

— Laurie Colwin

42. “We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable our own places are.”

— Laurie Colwin

43. “I’d like to go to all the knitting shops,” Doria said. “I want to see some rustic, hand-pulled yarn. I would also like to see some colonial fabrics, and, if possible, I would like to have some contact with a loom.”

— Laurie Colwin

44. “Unhappiness isn’t the worst thing in the world. It doesn’t last forever and it usually teaches you something about yourself.”

— Laurie Colwin

45. “Her research revealed that knitting was a very popular indoor sport and that a loom was on permanent display at the Wool Institute, which also had a few samples of colonial fabric.”

— Laurie Colwin

46. “Anxiety, she thought, was like a flock of birds on a telephone line. When people came around they flapped off, and when the people went away they hopped back on.”

— Laurie Colwin

47. “Cooking is like love. You don’t have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It’s the same thing with food.”

— Laurie Colwin