Peg Bracken Quotes

Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.

You don't get over hating to cook, any more than you get over having big feet.

Life is so very simple when you have no facts to confuse you.

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.

Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?

What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good natural-looking picture that doesn't resemble us.

the most all-around, practical, long-wearing illusions are the ones that you weave yourself.

As millions of women have done before me, I pulled domesticity over my head like a blanket and found I was still cold.

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.

How to Comfort Yourself When You Have Acted Like a Jackass Everyone does this occasionally, and you shouldn't feel too upset about it unless it happens quite often, such as three times a day, in which case you must simply get used to it. Remember, other people like you as well or better for it, because it makes them feel so superior; so you've spread a little sunshine. And at the very least, you've served as a bad example.

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.

You're not supposed to cuss when you're an old lady, and just when there's so much more to cuss about.

It's easier to find a traveling companion than to get rid of one.

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.

This is your dividing line, by the way, between child and nonchild - when the first trouble happens that Mama can't fix.

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.

People would have more leisure time if it weren't for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.

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.

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.

Many a restaurant seems to employ more copy writers than cooks.

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.

The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be.

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.

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.

... 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.