Julie Powell quotes:

Without the Project I was nothing but a secretary on a road to nowhere, drifting toward frosted hair and menthol addiction.

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.

I got my undergrad in Creative Writing, and then I didn't get my Masters in obsession, because I figured I already had that covered.

Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and an Internet connection can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be.

Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apartIt's sad, but a relief as well to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.

There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance.

So the end may be a long time coming, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a way of sneaking up on you.

Two years ago, I was a twenty-nine year old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one year old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me -- I certainly would.

Cooking saved my life! Sure, there were some miserable moments, but that was sort of the point, to find something challenging and consuming enough to take a place in the center of my life into which was creeping a horrible feeling of stasis and the doom of mediocrity.

Doors are going to open-doors you can't even imagine exist.

The nice thing about having a friend who is crazier than you are is that she bolsters your belief in your own sanity.

If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is.

Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else - not as fragile as we think they are.

I love that after a day when nothing is sure, and when I say 'nothing' I mean nothing, you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It's such a comfort.

Physically it's exhausting to cook every night. Existentially speaking, I have so much more energy having that time to myself in this project, this gift to myself at the end of the day. Even if it didn't go smoothly, it was still a gift.

The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer.

People want to care about people. People look after each other, given the chance. ... I believe just believing in goodness generates a tiny bit of the stuff, so that being so foolish as to believe in our better natures, if just for a day, we actually contribute to the sum total of generosity in the universe.

Maybe I needed to make like a potato, winnow myself down, be part of something that was not easy, just simple.

You can never have too much butter.

Metz's Perfection chronicles with lapidary precision one woman's climb back to happiness after not just a spouse's death, but also the shocking recognition that her life before that death was not what she had thought it was. The journey is a painful one, but Ms. Metz is much the stronger for having survived to recount it.

The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes

It's sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence.

But hard bitten cynicism leaves one feeling peevish, and too much of it can do lasting damage to your heart.

There are times with your friends when you just have to put their whole mess out of your mind for a while.