Top 200 Nora Ephron Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.”

— Nora Ephron

102. “Death doesn’t really feel eventual or inevitable. It still feels... avoidable somehow. But it’s not. We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.”

— Nora Ephron

103. “But the story I’m telling here began the day I discovered the affair between Mark and Thelma, and it ended exactly six weeks later. It has a happy ending, but that’s because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings, too, but that’s not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem of contemporary life.”

— Nora Ephron

104. “I actually believe in denial.”

— Nora Ephron

105. “I have for many years been puzzled by the persistence of Hugh Hefner. Why is he still here?”

— Nora Ephron

106. “I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.”

— Nora Ephron

107. “Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.”

— Nora Ephron

108. “If you’re looking for monogamy, you’d better marry a swan.”

— Nora Ephron

109. “Arthur shook his head. ‘I’ve always been terrible at colors,’ he said, ‘It comes from having grown up with the single-row box of crayons instead of the big box. If I’d had the big box I would now know taupe and cerise and ecru. Instead, all I know is burnt sienna. And what good does it do me? Never once I have I heard anything described as burnt sienna. Never once have I heard anyone say, “Follow that burnt sienna car.”

— Nora Ephron

110. “But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.”

— Nora Ephron

111. “Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”

— Nora Ephron

112. “A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it...”

— Nora Ephron

113. “The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.”

— Nora Ephron

114. “There are plenty of men who philander during the summer, to be sure, but they are usually the same lot who philander during the winter – albeit with less convenience.”

— Nora Ephron

115. “I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don’t. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I’m not.”

— Nora Ephron

116. “Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.”

— Nora Ephron

117. “To state the obvious, romantic comedies have to be funny and they have to be romantic. But one of the most important things, for me anyway, is that they be about two strong people finding their way to love.”

— Nora Ephron

118. “I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.”

— Nora Ephron

119. “Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this.”

— Nora Ephron

120. “One of the great things about movies is that it’s just that short period of time. It’s a bubble. The last thing you want to know is that Elizabeth and Darcy had a fight over how to treat the servants!”

— Nora Ephron

121. “What failure ofimagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possiblities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?”

— Nora Ephron

122. “American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away.”

— Nora Ephron

123. “A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.”

— Nora Ephron

124. “My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.”

— Nora Ephron

125. “Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.”

— Nora Ephron

126. “I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn’t know how to do it.”

— Nora Ephron

127. “But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.”

— Nora Ephron

128. “I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.”

— Nora Ephron

129. “Love is homesickness.”

— Nora Ephron

130. “One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.”

— Nora Ephron

131. “If I was home alone at night, I cooked myself an entire meal from one of these cookbooks. Then I sat down in front of the television set and ate it. I felt very brave and plucky as I ate my perfect dinner. Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind. I.”

— Nora Ephron

132. “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.”

— Nora Ephron

133. “Meanwhile, every so often, your children come to visit. They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can’t believe you’re lucky enough to know them. They make you laugh. They make you proud. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and months and years without laying a glove on them, but don’t dwell. There’s no point. It’s over. Except for the worrying. The worrying is forever.”

— Nora Ephron

134. “If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want.”

— Nora Ephron

135. “I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you.”

— Nora Ephron

136. “Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses?”

— Nora Ephron

137. “I’m very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.”

— Nora Ephron

138. “Success comes and goes. Your flops stay with you for life.”

— Nora Ephron

139. “You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.”

— Nora Ephron

140. “I remember thinking that no one had ever told me how much I would love my child; now, of course, I realized something else no one tells you: that a child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was.”

— Nora Ephron

141. “You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.”

— Nora Ephron

142. “With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child’s problems will never be important enough for a television movie.”

— Nora Ephron

143. “This year things are different. This year my husband is a stranger. Do not let this stranger see me eviscerated.”

— Nora Ephron

144. “One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger; it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.”

— Nora Ephron

145. “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.”

— Nora Ephron

146. “Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.”

— Nora Ephron

147. “It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. I mean we’ve all read pieces where we thought, ‘Oh, who gives a damn.’”

— Nora Ephron

148. “I mention all this so that you will understand that is part of the process: once you’ve found out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.”

— Nora Ephron

149. “Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all.”

— Nora Ephron

150. “Vera looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears. She does this sometimes, especially when I’m being hateful and difficult; she responds by having all the feelings I’m refusing to have. Now she reached over and took my hand, and we both began to cry.”

— Nora Ephron