War & Peace Quote by Alison Lurie

Domestic disaster as a declaration of war: that’s the sly voltage in Lurie’s line. She takes the most banal middle-class mishap - cookies left too long, smoke creeping out of the kitchen - and frames it with the sensory language of combat. “Burning odor... like explosives” doesn’t just heighten the stakes; it exposes how readily the home, supposedly a refuge from history, becomes a theater for aggression, grievance, and power plays.

The sentence works because it moves by escalation: odor to smoke to the “hot, sweet, ashy” specificity of scorched sugar, then the hard pivot to “The war has begun.” That last clause lands like a drumbeat precisely because the setup is so ordinary. Lurie understands that our private conflicts rarely announce themselves with banners; they arrive disguised as logistics and accidents, as small humiliations that trigger larger scripts. Someone forgot, someone didn’t care, someone is always the one cleaning up.

Subtextually, the kitchen is doing double duty: it’s literal evidence of neglect and a symbol of the gendered labor that keeps a household running. When that labor fails - or is sabotaged, or simply becomes too much - the breakdown reads as moral. Lurie’s genius is in how she lets smell carry the narrative: sweetness curdling into ash, comfort turning accusatory. “War” here isn’t metaphorical fluff; it’s the sudden realization that intimacy can be a front line, and that the smallest domestic burns can ignite campaigns of resentment.