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.
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.
People would have more leisure time if it weren’t for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.
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.
Quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal.
What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good natural-looking picture that doesn’t resemble us.
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.
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.
When I finally gathered, invented, stole, simplified, borrowed, and found a publisher for a clutch of reasonably foolproof recipes, I learned I had friends I hadn’t known about – more proof that a mutual dislike can be quite as sound a basis for friendship as a mutual devotion.
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.
Facts must be faced. Vegetables simply don’t taste as good as most other things do.
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.
People will admit to arson and mayhem sooner than no sense of humor.
There are worse things than being fat, and one of them is worrying about it all the time.
This is your dividing line, by the way, between child and nonchild – when the first trouble happens that Mama can’t fix.
Life is so very simple when you have no facts to confuse you.
It is a rare expert who clearly realizes how inexpert someone else can be.
There was something immensely comforting, I found, about a crumpet – so comforting that I’ve never forgotten about them and have even learned to make them myself against those times when I have no other source of supply.
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.
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.
When there’s a lot of it around, you never want it very much.