Quotes about onion (50 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“…we transform the sublime into an onion to remain unread.”

José Baroja book Mi último invierno

“[Ibn Battuta’s description of the preparation of samosa would make one’s mouth water even today:] “Minced meat cooked with almond, walnut, pistachios, onion and spices placed inside a thin bread and fried in ghee.””

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1
Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Water , Cooking

“Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

Feeling

“If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires' story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another, and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.”

Daniel Handler book The End

Source: The End (2006), Chapter 1

Life , Books , Way , Tear

“My most enduring memory of that year is not the birth of India and Pakistan. I could not even comprehend what was happening. As a teenager from a backward village in Pakistan, I had never seen a cycle, car or train. I was completely bewildered at the turn of events. All that mattered was how to get my next meal, usually a roti and an onion.”

Milkha Singh (1935) Indian track and field athlete

Flying Sikh': Indian sprinter Milkha Singh biopic set for release, 12 July 2013, 13 December 2013, BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-23241269,

Cars , Birth , Memory , Training

“An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

As quoted in You Must Remember This (1975) by Walter Wagner, p. 175
As quoted in ...

People , Cry

“People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.”

Eudora Welty book Delta Wedding

Source: Delta Wedding

People

“Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”

Carl Sandburg book Remembrance Rock

Variant: Life is an onion - you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.
Source: Remembrance Rock

Life , Time

“On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Namesake

Source: The Namesake

“Hey!" Claire called after him, as she leaned her backpack against the wall.
"No onions!"
"Your loss!"
"I meant for YOU! Not if you want to get kissed tonight!"
"Damn, girl. Harsh.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

Girl , Kiss , Loss

“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”

Edwidge Danticat Krik? Krak!

Source: Krik? Krak!

Women

“If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car, (about the BMW X3).”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Cars , Thinking

“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

Source: The Long Goodbye

“It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Life , Time , Cry

“He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eye socket.
"I see Sophie has been busy again. Couldn't you have restrained her, my friend?" The skull yattered its teeth at him. Howl put it down rather hastily.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Howl's Moving Castle

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

Business

“Calvin: Why are you crying mom?
Mom: I'm cutting up an onion.
Calvin: It must be hard to cook if you anthrpomorphisize your vegetables.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Moms , Cry , Cooking

“I find myself fascinated by a man who admits to enjoying fairy tales and uses the word "impinge"- barely misses a beat while indulging in a brief girl-on-girl fantasy. You're a man of layers, Ford."
Me and Shrek, we're onions.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Tribute

Girl

“Titchy little snapperwhippers like you should not be higgling around with an old sage and onions who is hundreds of years more than you.”

Roald Dahl The BFG

Source: The BFG

“He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Business

“You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.'

How?'

Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Thinking

“Fellini was a man of many selves and contradictions: he quoted Dante with genuine emotion while executing pornographic doodles on the table napkin then balked at paying the lunch bill while handing out millions of lire to the beggars of Rome. Although he boasted he was heterosexual, he nonetheless directed one of the greatest bisexual films of all time. He was Mr. Cool as well as the Nutty Professor. He contains multitudes and the journey to his center never ceases. Quite simply, you end up cherishing an Onion Man with no center. Federico really had a rough time of it but pretended otherwise and had the grace never to expose his personal problems in public. And then there are the films that continuously generate new meanings. For example, 8 1/2 contains alembicated allusions to Hamlet of tremendous power and beauty that resonate in the mind long after the film is over.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini's personality, in Indiewire (April, 2003)

Beauty , Quotes , Problem , Time

“It was great, I love onions!”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Attributed

Love

“Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden-fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad bowl.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Bk. I, To a Gardener.
Underwoods (1887)

Soul , Wine

“A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

16 March 1854
Notebooks, The English Notebooks (1853 - 1858)

“It was so gnarly, dude, and I'd been on his show a couple times, so I basically figured we were homies. I yelled over to him, and I was like, 'Yo, Reg, what up?' And then get this: He called me the Red Onion! Dude, it was so epic. It was totally rad.”

Shaun White (1986) American snowboarder and skateboarder

Saslow, Eli (2006). "For Fun, White Is on Board" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901248.html Washington Post (accessed July 17, 2006).
On sitting next to Regis Philbin at a Knicks game.

Time

“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

“A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The signiﬁcance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Texts from Housman”, p. 21
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Parting

“If you're hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, "Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!"”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 6 November 2006, The banks are coming over all chummy. It's nauseating http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1940584,00.html
On Barclays' rebranding in an attempt to make themselves appear less stuffy
Guardian columns

Money , Travel , Hell

“All hell has broken loose. I admit our Russian is limited, but we can say hello, come in, you are beautiful, oh no you don't. … So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda. Something has slipped badly.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

On difficulties while traveling in the USSR (20 August 1947), in Steinbeck : A Life in Letters (1976)

Beauty , Coffee , Hell

“I normally have them cooked on the barbecue, but I enjoy onions!”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Prime Minister Tony Abbott pictured biting into an onion ... again http://www.smh.com.au/national/prime-minister-tony-abbott-pictured-biting-into-an-onion--again-20150812-gixsju.html, August 12, 2015.
2015

Cooking

“This next song is about how sad I am. It's about all the sad stuff; just picture a depressed onion cutting itself.”

Bo Burnham (1990) American comedian, musician, and actor

what. (2013)

Sadness

“Avoid stories, unless short, pointed, and quite apropos. “He who deals in them,” says Swift, “must either have a very large stock, or a good memory, or must often change his company.” Some have a set of them hung together like onions: they take possession of the conversation by an early introduction of one; and then you must have the whole rope, and there is an end of everything else, perhaps, for that meeting, though you may have heard all twenty times before.”

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

Memory , Change , Time

“There is a shy client who uses invisible ink on Nagiko's body to hide his obvious talent. The woman attempts to develop the invisible ink by bathing in warm water, by standing as close as she dare to a hot fire, by washing her body in the juice of onion-skins until the onions make her weep and her tears prove to be the necessary solvent to reveal the writing.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Section J of 26 Facts About Flesh and Ink
The Pillow Book

Tear , Water

“Our citizens put up chilies and onions to prevent the rain from falling.”

Lee Hsien Loong (1952) Prime Minister of Singapore

2008 Singapore Grand Prix

“For me these things are like an onion, as you discover more layers, you cry even more. There are no winners in wars, only blood and losers.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Para mí estas cosas son como una cebolla, entre más capas descubres, más vas llorando. No hay vencedores en las guerras, sólo sangre y vencidos.
Interview with Guillermo del Toro on 10/09/2006. http://www.elmundo.es/encuentros/invitados/2006/10/2192/

War , Cry

“The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

World , Soul , Nature , Time

“Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus… of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.
Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.
This is indeed amazing.
Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.
But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i. e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.”

G. Spencer-Brown (1923–2016) British mathematician

Source: Laws of Form, (1969), p. 104-05; as cited in: David Phillip Barndollar (2004) The Poetics of Complexity and the Modern Long Poem https://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2004/barndollardp50540/barndollardp50540.pdf, The University of Texas at Austin, p. 12-13.

World , Law , Way , Travel

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s

People , Problem , Time

“Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily … None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , Life , World , Search

“Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Recipe for Salad

Animals

“Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Coffee , Nostalgia

“Hemp and marijuana should be regulated like onions. No difference. If you can grow onion in your backyard, you can grow hemp or weed in your backyard. If you can grow onions in your farm, your family farm, you can grow help or marijuana in your family farm.”

Larry Sharpe (1968) American politician

Speech at the Annual 2018 NYC Cannabis Parade ( May 5, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T5P2bTXuss)

Family , Help , Marijuana

“Science Digest asked me to see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and write an article for them on the science it contained. I saw the picture and was appalled. I remained appalled even after a doctor’s examination had assured me that no internal organs had been shaken loose by its ridiculous soundwaves. (If you can’t be good, be loud, some say, and Close Encounters was very loud.) … Hollywood must deal with large audiences, most of whom are utterly unfamiliar with good science fiction. It has to bend to them, meet them at least half-way. Fully appreciating that, I could enjoy Planet of the Apes and Star Wars. Star Wars was entertainment for the masses and did not try to be anything more. Leave your sophistication at the door, get into the spirit, and you can have a fun ride. … Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions, or reading a bad book for the dirty parts. Optical wizardry is something a movie can do that a book can’t but it is no substitute for a story, for logic, for meaning. It is ornamentation, not substance. In fact, whenever a science fiction picture is praised overeffusively for its special effects, I know it’s a bad picture. Is that all they can find to talk about?”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Editorial: The Reluctant Critic", in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 6, (12 November 1978) https://archive.org/stream/Asimovs_v02n06_1978-11-12/
General sources

War , Books , Way , Star

“Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love…I am trying to be truthful.”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Valentine, from Mean Time (1993).

Love , Truth , Light , Heart

“Cheeseburger is paradise.
Heaven on earth with an onion slice.
Not too particular, not too precise.
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise.I like mine with lettuce and tomato,
Heinz Fifty-seven and French fried potatoes.
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer.
Well, good God Almighty, which way do I steer?
For my cheeseburger in paradise.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Cheeseburger in Paradise
Song lyrics, Son of a Son of a Sailor (1978)

God , Way , Beer

“How can you worship leeks and onions? we shall suppose a SORBONNIST to say to a priest of SAIS. If we worship them, replies the latter; at least, we do not, at the same time, eat them. But what strange object of adoration are cats and monkeys? says the learned doctor. They are at least as good as the relics or rotten bones of martyrs, answers his no less learned antagonist. Are you not mad, insists the Catholic, to cut one another's throat about the preference of a cabbage or a cucumber? Yes, says the pagan; I allow it, if you will confess, that those are still madder, who fight about the preference among volumes of sophistry, ten thousand of which are not equal in value to one cabbage or cucumber.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Part XII - With regard to doubt or conviction
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Cats , Learning , Time , Fight

“Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

Books , Literature , Beer

“Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Inside Information
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
Context: There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

Lie

“Beef, wine, garlic, onions, and tobacco are Tamasic food-stuffs. They exercise a very unwholesome influence on the human mind and fill it with emotions of anger, darkness, and inertia.”

Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) Indian philosopher

Bliss Divine, Chapter 82, Vegetarianism, Divine Life Society, http://www.dlshq.org/books/es19.htm (circa 1959)

Exercises , Wine , Anger , Food

“Overall there is a smell of fried onions”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide.
Misattributed
Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide. First attributed, not necessarily seriously, by Robert Anton Wilson in his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy (1979). Possibly Wilson's version is his humorous descendant of a statement in an 1870 address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., about his own experience with chloroform: "A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole." In 1945 Bertrand Russell claimed that James reported a similar statement from an unnamed man.
Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/31/turpentine-prevails/ Quote Investigator