Bread and Wine Quotes

“We don't learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“The heart of hospitality is about creating space for someone to feel seen and heard and loved. It's about declaring your table a safe zone, a place of warmth and nourishment.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“When you offer peace instead of division, when you offer faith instead of fear, when you offer someone a place at your table instead of keeping them out because they’re different or messy or wrong somehow, you represent the heart of Christ.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“We don't come to the table to fight or to defend. We don't come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“One thing’s for sure: if you decide to be courageous and sane, if you decide not to overspend or overcommit or overschedule, the healthy people in your life will respect those choices. And the unhealthy people in your life will freak out, because you’re making a healthy choice they’re not currently free to make. Don’t for one second let that stop you.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“I have also long held the belief that one's tears are a guide, that when something makes you cry, it means something. If we pay attention to our tears, they'll show us something about ourselves”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world -- this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world -- no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“To those of us who believe that all of life is sacred every crumb of bread and sip of wine is a Eucharist, a remembrance, a call to awareness of holiness right where we are.

I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond church walls, out of the hands of priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchens and dining rooms and backyards.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“I found that each time a test was negative, it stopped the dreaming and hoping for a while. Taking the test was a way of puncturing the balloons of hope, because if I didn't, they would lift and lift without any evidence, and their falling back down every month was too painful. Essentially, I took all these tests to keep myself from hoping, because the hoping was breaking my heart.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“So this is the dance, it seems to me: to be the kind of host who honors the needs of the people who gather around his or her table, and to be the kind of guest who comes to the table to learn, not to demand.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“But entertaining isn't a sport or a competition. It's an act of love, if you let it be. You can twist it and turn it into anything you want—a way to show off your house, a way to compete with your friends, a way to earn love and approval. Or you can decide that every time you open your door, it's an act of love, not performance or competition or striving. You can decide that every time people gather around your table, your goal is nourishment, not neurotic proving. You can decide.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“I’m not talking about cooking as performance, or entertaining as a complicated choreography of competition and showing off. I’m talking about feeding someone with honesty and intimacy and love, about making your home a place where people are fiercely protected, even if just for a few hours, from the crush and cruelty of the day.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“What I’m finding is that when I’m hungry, lots of times what I really want more than food is an external voice to say, “You’ve done enough. It’s OK to be tired. You can take a break. I’ll take care of you. I see how hard you’re trying.” There is, though, no voice that can say that except the voice of God. The work I’m doing now is to let those words fall deeply on me, to give myself permission to be tired, to be weak, to need.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“But I took a deep breath, and she sat there listening to me across my dirty coffee table, and we talked about community and family and authenticity. It’s easy to talk about it, and really, really hard sometimes to practice it. This is why the door stays closed for so many of us, literally and figuratively. One friend promises she’ll start having people over when they finally have money to remodel. Another says she’d be too nervous that people wouldn’t eat the food she made, so she never makes the invitation. But it isn’t about perfection, and it isn’t about performance. You’ll miss the richest moments in life—the sacred moments when we feel God’s grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love—if you’re too scared or too ashamed to open the door. I know it’s scary, but throw open the door anyway, even though someone might see you in your terribly ugly half-zip.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“When you eat, I want you to think of God, of the holiness of hands that feed us, of the provision we are given every time we eat. When you eat bread and you drink wine, I want you to think about the body and the blood every time, not just when the bread and wine show up in church, but when they show up anywhere— on a picnic table or a hardwood floor or a beach.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“I became the person people don't want to tell they're pregnant. I hate that. A friend told me her happy, fantastic news, and just a second later she burst out crying, afraid for how this would make me feel. I hate that. I work really hard to arrange my face in such a way that approximates uncomplicated glee. And I am happy for them, or course. But sometimes just after the happiness is the desperation. Some days are easier than others.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“What makes me feel alive and connected to God's voice and spirit in this world is creating opportunities for the people I love to rest and connect and be fed at my table. I believe it's the way I was made, and I believe it matters. For many years, I didn't let it matter, for a whole constellation of reasons, but part of becoming yourself, in a deeply spiritual way, is finding the words to tell the truth about what it is you really love.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“These are things I can't change. Not one of them. Can't fix, can't heal, can't put the broken pieces back together. But what I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and the mess. That's all any of us can do. That's what we're here for. Not the battle lines, keeping people in and out. Not the "pro" and "anti" stances, but the presence, the listening, the praying with and for on the days when it all falls apart, when life shatters in our hands.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Many cooks and food writers have nothing but negative things to say about people who have dietary restrictions or preferences. Quite often it's suggested that you just make what you want to make, and everyone can find something to eat, most likely. But if feeding people around your table is about connecting with them more than it is about showing off your menu or skills, isn't it important to cook in such a way that their preferences or restrictions are honored?”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Sometimes people ask me why I travel so much, and specifically why we travel with Henry so often. I think they think it’s easier to keep the kids at home, in their routines, surrounded by their stuff. It is. But we travel because it’s there. Because Capri exists and Kenya exists and Tel Aviv exists, and I want to taste every bite of it. We travel because I want my kids to learn, as I learned, that there are a million ways to live, a million ways to eat, a million ways to dress and speak and view the world. I want them to know that “our way” isn’t the right way, but just one way, that children all over the world, no matter how different they seem, are just like the children in our neighborhood—they love to play, to discover, to learn. I want my kids to learn firsthand and up close that different isn’t bad, but instead that different is exciting and wonderful and worth taking the time to understand. I want them to see themselves as bit players in a huge, sweeping, beautiful play, not as the main characters in the drama of our living room. I want my kids to taste and smell and experience the biggest possible world, because every bite of it, every taste and texture and flavor, is delicious.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“But our goal, remember, is to feed around our table the people we love. We’re not chefs or restaurateurs or culinary school graduates, and we shouldn’t try to be. Make it the way the people you love want to eat it.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us. Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“It's so easy to think that because you can't do something extraordinary, you can't do anything at all. It's easy to decide that if you can't overhaul your entire life in one fell swoop, then you might as well just do nothing. We started where we could, with what we had. I hope it's just the beginning for us.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Risotto is one of those dishes you just have to try a few times yourself, to teach yourself the moves and sounds and smells and textures. This is a guide map, but kind of a rough and tattered one.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“We have, each one of us, been entrusted with one life, made up of days and hours and minutes. We're spending them according to our values, whether or not we admit it.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“In almost every part of life, the important moments are not the ones you'd think are the important ones. The really important moments are before the "big" moments. When you're writing, the moment you sit down at the keyboard isn't the magic moment; the magic moments are when you decide to see and hear and remember and taste everything in the whole world, choosing to believe that art and creativity are all around you, unfolding and beckoning you. And running is about sleep, water, getting a babysitter, not having that last glass or two of wine. By the time you've laced up your shoes and you're moving your feet, most of the hard choices have been made.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“But it isn’t about perfection, and it isn’t about performance. You’ll miss the richest moments in life—the sacred moments when we feel God’s grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love—if you’re too scared or too ashamed to open the door.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes