American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away.
[I] had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.)
Eat every meal as if it's your last; when the last one comes, you probably won't be very hungry.
The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many... somethings. So, thanks.
I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are.
Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.
Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.
Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.
You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).
If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.
I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
You can never have too much butter - that is my belief. If I have a religion, that's it.
Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home... only to no home I'd ever known... I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic. - Sleepless in Seattle
... 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 am truly beside myself.
Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.
I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity [Wellesley] stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word. How marvelous it would have been to go to a women's college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.
And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.
If there is a Nora Ephron signature anything it is that there's slightly too much food. I have a friend whose mantra is: You must choose. And I believe the exact opposite: I think you should always have at least four desserts that are kind of fighting with each other.
I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.
When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.
Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.
I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.
People have only one way to be.
You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
Verbal ability is a highly overrated thing in a guy, and it's our pathetic need for it that gets us into so much trouble.
My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.
Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void. - You've Got Mail
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.
From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
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?
Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, 'Why am I out there looking for directors?'—because you look at a list of directors, it's all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, 'I'm just gonna become a director and that'll make it easier.'
Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: 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? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?
I'll have what she's having
When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl Streep to play you. You'll feel much better.
Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.
Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life? "
When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.
That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.
Take notes. Everything is copy.
Vera said: 'Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?' So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.
We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy.
There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.
The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.
So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting.
Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.
I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.
I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies.
I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist.
And so, Thanksgiving. Its the most amazing holiday. Just think about it — it's a miracle that once a year so many millions of Americans sit down to exactly the same meal as one another, exactly the same meal they grew up eating, and exactly the same meal they ate a year earlier. The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Is there anything else we all can agree so vehemently about? I don't think so.
We have lived through the era when happiness was a warm puppy, and the era when happiness was a dry martini, and now we have come to the era when happiness is 'knowing what your uterus looks like'.
I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.
I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.
I have a theory that children remember two things-when you weren't there and when they threw up.
That's another thing about being a certain age that I've noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror.
The hardest thing about writing is writing.
Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.
What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.
In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies.
I don't want to be someone that you're settling for. I don't want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn't it?
So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?
No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. Sex is always out there. Friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
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.
Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.
I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic.
Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.
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.
The one thing I would like to get across about my whole feeling regarding high school is how I was when I was fifteen. Gawky. Always a hem hanging down, or strap loose, or a pimple on my chin. I never knew what to do with my hair. I was a mess. And I still carry that fifteen-year-old girl around now. A piece of me still believes I'm the girl nobody dances with.
You can't meet someone until you become what you're becoming.
Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.
When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.
The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over. Enough about that. The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it's not.
A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.
Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.
Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.
Success comes and goes. Your flops stay with you for life.
Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while. - Sleepless in Seattle
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.
If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.
Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up.
You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.
The empty nest is underrated.
I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.
One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.
The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.
Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.
And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
Food is one of my favourite things. Though I certainly know lots of people who happen to be happily married who don't have food play the role in it that it plays in my life. And I don't know how they do it, and frankly I feel so bad for them because I just love food and one of my favourite things is asking, "What do we want for dinner? What do we feel like eating?" That wonderful negotiation that goes on several times a week about what "we" feel like.
When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match. - Sleepless in Seattle
My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!
I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, was I really in love or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love or was I just desperate?
The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.
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.
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. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.
I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
I cannot understand any woman's wanting to be the first woman to do anything. ... It is a devastating burden and I could not take it, could not be a pioneer, a Symbol of Something Greater.
In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.
Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip.
One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged.
You can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
I think if you're lucky enough to find a voice in whatever you do, that voice will come sneaking out no matter what.
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.
[on the screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally"] It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work.
You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.
A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it.
It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.
I actually believe in denial.
I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved.
Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.
Beware of men who cry. It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.
Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy.
The realization that I may have only a few good yeras remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.
I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.
…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.
New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)
