Peg Bracken
Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.Collection: Love
You don't get over hating to cook, any more than you get over having big feet.Collection: Hate
Life is so very simple when you have no facts to confuse you.Collection: Simple
Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?Collection: Memorable
It is important to remember that these are your Declining Years, in which you can jolly well decline to do what you don't feel like doing, unless not doing it would make you feel worse than doing it.Collection: Years
What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good natural-looking picture that doesn't resemble us.Collection: Taken
the most all-around, practical, long-wearing illusions are the ones that you weave yourself.Collection: Long
As millions of women have done before me, I pulled domesticity over my head like a blanket and found I was still cold.Collection: Wife
I recently adopted for my own a good motto I saw somewhere, on a barroom mirror or possibly a washroom wall: 'The time you enjoyed wasting wasn't wasted.' I think I'll have that printed some day on a T-shirt or the bedroom ceiling.Collection: Wall
You're not supposed to cuss when you're an old lady, and just when there's so much more to cuss about.Collection: Old Lady
Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things... My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from.Collection: Tombstone
It's easier to find a traveling companion than to get rid of one.Collection: Funny
Every idea is my last. I feel sure of it. So, I try to do the best with each as it comes and that's where my responsibility ends. But I just don't wait for ideas. I look for them. Constantly. And if I don't use the ideas that I find, they're going to quit showing up.Collection: Responsibility
it isn't true, by the way, that nothing is as bad as you think it's going to be. Some things are exactly as bad as you thought they were going to be, and some things are worse.Collection: Thinking
This is your dividing line, by the way, between child and nonchild - when the first trouble happens that Mama can't fix.Collection: Children
People would have more leisure time if it weren't for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.Collection: People
Molded salads are best served in situations where they have little or no competition ... Like television, gelatin is too often a vehicle for limp leftovers that couldn't make it anywhere else.Collection: Food
Many a restaurant seems to employ more copy writers than cooks.Collection: Restaurants
But let me say this about learning experiences: they're weird. Or put it this way: what you learn from a learning experience is generally something else.Collection: Learning
When people say it's a funny thing about them, you will probably be able to control your hysterics. They are only getting ready to announce the shattering fact that they don't like something. And it's not going to be something that's really quite awful, like suttee or apartheid; it's going to be something small.Collection: Funny Things
The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be.Collection: Sex
Kitchens were different then, too - not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different from a frozen pie thawing.Collection: Smell
One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church.Collection: Piano
travel never made a bore interesting; it only makes for a well-traveled bore, in the same way coffee makes for a wide-awake drunk. In fact, the more a bore travels, the worse he gets. The only advantage in it for his friends and family is that he isn't home as much.Collection: Coffee
Drinking: something to do while getting drunk.Collection: Drinking
... parents embarrass their children probably more than the other way around. I don't know why we should blush so hard for our parents -- we didn't rear them -- and yet we do.Collection: Children
forgetting things is what gives old age a bad name, that and old age.Collection: Names
People will admit to arson and mayhem sooner than no sense of humor.Collection: Humor
... I've never found anything whatsoever that is as easy to do the right way as the wrong way, and if there is such a thing I would like to know about it.Collection: Way
One's travel life is basically as incommunicable as his sex life is.Collection: Travel
You may have noticed, as I have, that if ever you find yourself declaring emphatically and unequivocally that you will never do some one particular thing, chances are good that this is precisely what you will one day find yourself doing.Collection: Finding Yourself
It isn't surprising that many children consider their parents to be a little dim, and that they sometimes try to update them. The fact that they don't usually try too hard is just as well; a thoroughly updated parent is an unappetizing sight.Collection: Children
many people choose, early on, their own truths from the large smorgasbord available. And once they've chosen them, for good reason or no reason, they then proceed rather selectively, wisely gathering whatever will bolster them or at least carry out the color scheme.Collection: Truth
It is a rare expert who clearly realizes how inexpert someone else can be.Collection: Experts
a celebrity is someone who no longer does the things that made him a celebrity.Collection: Doe
When you're little, time stretches obligingly, and vacation is forever.Collection: Vacation
There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who don't cook out of and have NEVER cooked out of THE I HATE TO COOK BOOK, and the other kind...The I HATE TO COOK people consist mainly of those who find other things more interesting and less fattening, and so they do it as seldom as possible. Today there is an Annual Culinary Olympics, with hundreds of cooks from many countries ardently competing. But we who hate to cook have had our own Olympics for years, seeing who can get out of the kitchen the fastest and stay out the longest.Collection: Country
Like a chastity belt, the package tour keeps you out of mischief but a bit restive for wondering what you missed.Collection: Travel
It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English.Collection: Country
Cheese for dessert is rather like Paradise Lost in that everyone thinks he ought to like it, but still you don't notice too many people actually curling up with it.Collection: Thinking
Quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal.Collection: Eye
Mothers always think you are working either too hard or not hard enough.Collection: Mother
This wild emaciated look appeals to some women, though not to many men, who are seldom seen pinning up a Vogue illustration in a machine shop.Collection: Men
I didn't learn for years that you generally find your Self after you quit looking for it.Collection: Self
On their return from a trip, it is wise to see friends promptly, before they've had time to get their pictures developed.Collection: Wise
The same fire that hardens the egg will melt the butter; and much depends on the personality type, whether you customarily rise to a challenge or whether you sink. For as long as I can remember, I have been a sinker. One challenge, and I drop like a rock.Collection: Fire
The fact is, the cocktail party has much in its favor. Going to one is a good way of indicating that you're still alive and about, if such is the case, and that you're glad other people are, without having to spend an entire evening proving it.Collection: Party
Peas went with carrots as infallibly as ham went with eggs. For years I thought carrots and peas grew on the same vine.Collection: Years
I believe that one's basic financial attitudes are - like a tendency toward fat knees - probably formed in utero, or, at the very latest, in cribbo.Collection: Attitude