2
" Sleeping alone was another luxurious pleasure that should have been depressing but wasn’t. I got to hog the covers, sprawl across the whole mattress, use all the pillows, and move around as much as I wanted without worrying about disturbing anyone else. No one snored in my ear or talked in his sleep. No one woke me up. No one stole the covers or accidentally nudged me with his leg or got up and creaked the floorboards on the way to the bathroom. After my satisfying solitary dinner, I was the captain of my bed, the master of my sleep. But even so, I longed for a bedmate—the urge became stronger and stronger as the months went on. I became tired of the blue hour, cooking for one, eating everything all by myself, watching the cars streaming over the bridge, and daydreaming about falling in love. "
― Kate Christensen , Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites
6
" Food is a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire, but it opens the eater to all of it without changing anything. If carnality is what you’re after, there’s a danger of increased frustration in the seductive, savory earthiness of a plate of spinach ravioli with sage butter: food can do many things, but it can’t substitute for sex. If you’re seized with terrible, unprintable rage toward someone you love, a ripe, velvety avocado can send you over the edge with its innocent bystander meekness. "
― Kate Christensen , Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites
7
" My mother was a cook of the plain, simple, homey variety, which was perfect for our undeveloped palates. She wasn’t a puritan or a health nut, but she greatly cared what we ate and took pains to serve us good meals every night. Sometimes, when she dished up one of her typical home-cooked dinners, and we told her how good it was and asked for seconds, she would say half joking, “Aw, it’s nothing but a blue plate special! "
― Kate Christensen , Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites
8
" Part of it might have been the romance of eating the food that had comforted and nourished my mother when she was very young and very poor, and part of it might have been how good these meals were, but the term “blue plate special” has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me. It brings me right back to Wildermuth, back to that time in my childhood when I had my mother and my sisters all to myself; we were a complete family then, just us four girls, living in a wild, strange place, making a home for ourselves. "
― Kate Christensen , Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites
9
" I wanted to live in a clean, renovated Victorian house full of books, not a rough-hewn, unfinished industrial loft. I wanted to raise bright, good kids, to write bright, good novels in a quiet study, to cook wholesome meals and listen to Bach. He wanted to play loud amplified music, sleep late, drink tequila, and travel. It seemed to me that we didn’t want to be the people we’d married each other for. "
― Kate Christensen , Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites
10
" I just finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” I confided. “And I am craving chocolate now like crazy.” I wasn’t asking for chocolate; that would have been rude. I was simply answering her question, and I expected her to say longingly, “I know exactly what you mean,” looking off into the middle distance as she viscerally remembered the book’s lascivious, melting descriptions. “Well, sorry,” she said instead, her cheer undaunted, “I don’t have any!” And off she went, before I could explain. This might have been the first time I realized that not everyone’s brain was wired the same way mine was. "
― Kate Christensen , Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites
