Top 40 Ruth Reichl Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning.”

— Ruth Reichl

2. “Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.”

— Ruth Reichl

3. “Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”

— Ruth Reichl

4. “Nothing feels as good as building a team and empowering people, watching them grow and thrive.”

— Ruth Reichl

5. “Life is so endlessly delicious.”

— Ruth Reichl

6. “When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.”

— Ruth Reichl

7. “It is not ‘only’ food, I said heatedly. There’s meaning hidden underneath each dish.”

— Ruth Reichl

8. “A great meal is an experience that nourishes more than your body.”

— Ruth Reichl

9. “She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.”

— Ruth Reichl

10. “Anyone who thinks they’re too grown up or too sophisticated to eat caramel corn, is not invited to my house for dinner.”

— Ruth Reichl

11. “When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”

— Ruth Reichl

12. “Plain fresh bread, its crust shatteringly crisp. Sweet cold butter. There is magic in the way they come together in your mouth to make a single perfect bite.”

— Ruth Reichl

13. “We waited, eating resilient, deeply satisfying bread dipped in spicy oil that tasted exactly like fresh olives. Doug reached out and stroked my knee and I had a sudden conscious thought that I was happy.”

— Ruth Reichl

14. “Don’t you just love the idea of cooking flowers? I imagine them bursting into bloom, right in the pan.”

— Ruth Reichl

15. “Change works both ways. You must accept those moments, experience them, and let them go. Because if you allow yourself to get stuck in that minute, nothing will ever change.” “What are you saying?” “I am telling you that if things can change for the worse, the opposite is also true. But only if you open yourself to the possibilities. As Lulu did. It is what one finds so appealing about her.” It.”

— Ruth Reichl

16. “Lulu writes: “When Mother, Mr. Jones and I were walking through those strange, crowded downtown streets, where people were sticking their hands into pickle barrels, pointing to smoked fish, and eating sliced herring, I saw the scene in a whole new way. They weren’t buying food: They were finding their way home.”

— Ruth Reichl

17. “I’d rather be a fool than hard-hearted.”

— Ruth Reichl

18. “What I was learning, on those weekend walks, is how much you can find out about a person merely by watching what he eats. Food became my own private way of looking at the world.”

— Ruth Reichl

19. “I am telling you that if things can change for the worse, the opposite is also true. But only if you open yourself to the possibilities.”

— Ruth Reichl

20. “But I have always been persuaded that someday, when I grow up, I am destined for great things. And then I wonder when, exactly, I expect that will be.”

— Ruth Reichl

21. “While cooking demands your entire attention, it also rewards you with endlessly sensual pleasures... The seductive softness of chocolate beginning to melt from solid to liquid. The tug of sauce against the spoon when it thickens in teh pan, and the lovely lightness of Parmesan drifting from the grater in gossamer flakes. Time slows down in teh kitchen, offering up an entire universe of small satisfactions.”

— Ruth Reichl

22. “I just can’t imagine somebody else in the White House. I’m sure President Truman is a good man, but even the words feel peculiar in my mouth. A world without President Roosevelt seems like a strange and scary place.”

— Ruth Reichl

23. “That’s the most terrible thing about being a child; you’re convinced that it’s all your fault.” Lulu.”

— Ruth Reichl

24. “Growing up, I was utterly oblivious to the fact that Mom was teaching me all that. But I was instantly aware of her final lesson, which was hidden in her notes and leters. As I read them I began to understand that in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, Mom showed me that it is never too late to find out how to do it.”

— Ruth Reichl

25. “The more stars in your itinerary, the less likely you are to find the real life of another country. I’d forgotten how money becomes a barrier insulating you from ordinary life.”

— Ruth Reichl

26. “When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.”

— Ruth Reichl

27. “I got back into the car thinking how lucky I was to be aware of happiness. Most people don’t recognize their own good fortune until it has departed. And then it is too late.” “What about Remy? What.”

— Ruth Reichl

28. “It was Mac who first made me think about the way food brought people together – and kept them apart.”

— Ruth Reichl

29. “I discovered that endings have their own odd thrill. In the mania of the moment, it’s possible to forget what you are losing.”

— Ruth Reichl

30. “That’s what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.”

— Ruth Reichl

31. “The best antidote for sadness, I have always believed, is tackling something that you don’t know how to do.”

— Ruth Reichl

32. “Hope can’t hurt.”

— Ruth Reichl

33. “We’re in a transient state – why hate our present selves? Let’s save the energy for when we are eighty, when we are perhaps above, or beyond, changing. Then we can hate, if hate we must.”

— Ruth Reichl

34. “I felt that I was really living in the moment. I did not know where my life was going, but right now the future did not trouble me.”

— Ruth Reichl

35. “I feel as if there’s a huge gulf separating me from all the lucky people in the world; they have so much to look forward to.”

— Ruth Reichl

36. “We slid along water reds and greens, the changing lights captured in the canvas of wet tar.”

— Ruth Reichl

37. “I decided that it wasn’t pretty that I felt, but confident.”

— Ruth Reichl

38. “I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.”

— Ruth Reichl

39. “We were having a class on civics, talking about what makes America a great country. I said I thought one important reason is that we’ve all come from different places in the world and that we learn from one another.”

— Ruth Reichl

40. “Children, I came to understand, need you around, even if they ignore you. In fact they need you around so they can ignore you.”

— Ruth Reichl

41. “Reminded us how exciting it was to abandon security and run toward the life that is waiting.”

— Ruth Reichl

42. “Still, if I’m being honest, I have to admit that working women everywhere accepted casual misogyny. We were so accustomed to taking what men dished out that we thought it was up to us to find ways to deflect the advances of bosses and co-workers without hurting their feelings. As.”

— Ruth Reichl

43. “Nothing is sexier than a competent man: I was in love.”

— Ruth Reichl

44. “I’d learned an important lesson: When something frightens me, it is definitely worth doing.”

— Ruth Reichl

45. “Hermione was back, holding out a gossamer dress of rainbow chiffon so airy I thought of fireflies on a moonlight night.”

— Ruth Reichl

46. “The weather was gray, the streets filled with that Sunday morning silence that makes you feel like everybody else is home with people that they love.”

— Ruth Reichl

47. “I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.”

— Ruth Reichl