Onion Quotes

"We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at."
-Numbers (11:5-6)

"I crawled into the vegetable bin, settled on a giant onion and ate it, skin and all. It must have marked me for life for I have never ceased to love the hearty flavor of onions."
-James Beard, American cooking expert and author

"I will not move my army without onions!"
-Ulysses S. Grant

"It's hard to imagine civilization without onions."
-Julia Child

"The onion and its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul."
-My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner

"Onion skins very thin,
Mild winter coming in.
Onion skins very tough,
Coming winter very rough."
-old English rhyme

"If you hear an onion ring, answer it."
-Anonymous

"It's probably illegal to make soups, stews and casseroles without plenty of onions."
-Maggie Waldron, American author and editor

"Life is like an onion.
You peel it off one layer at a time;
And sometimes you weep."
-Carl Sandburg, American poet

"Onions can make even heirs and widows weep."
-Benjamin Franklin

"Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it."
-James Gibbons Huneker, American musician, critic

"For this is every cook's opinion,
No savoury dish without an onion;
But lest your kissing should be spoiled,
Your onions should be thoroughly boiled."
-Jonathon Swift, Irish satirist

"Take care to chop the onion fine."
-Opening line of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

"Why is it that the poet tells
So little of the sense of smell?
These are the odors I love well:
The smell of coffee freshly ground;
Or rich plum pudding, holly crowned;
Or onions fried and deeply browned…"
-Christopher Morley, poet

"It was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions."
-The reason the Queen of Hearts wants to behead the Seven-of-Spades in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
"Mine eyes smell onions: I shall weep anon."
-All's Well that Ends Well by William Shakespeare

"The onion tribe is prophylactic and highly invigorating, and even more necessary to cookery than parsley itself."
-George Ellwanger, British food writer

"Banish (the onion) from the kitchen and the pleasure flies with it. Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest delicacy to hopeless insipidity, and dinner to despair."
-Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, American columnist