Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth David

There is a quiet heresy in Elizabeth David admitting that the work doesn’t “come easily” and, worse, that it only hardens with time. We’re trained on the romance of mastery: do something long enough and it becomes second nature. David punctures that myth with a line that sounds almost offhand, yet lands like a verdict. The subtext isn’t incompetence; it’s standards. Difficulty here reads less like blockage than like an escalating intolerance for the sloppy sentence, the cheap flourish, the unearned certainty.

Coming from a writer whose authority helped remake postwar British cooking, the admission carries extra charge. David’s public image is taste made confident: vivid travel, exacting recipes, a kind of sensory command. The line reveals the cost behind that poise. As her cultural influence grew, so did the pressure to be definitive; every new piece had to justify its place in a world already stocked with her own best work. Success doesn’t smooth the road, it raises the bar and narrows the lane.

The phrasing matters. “It gets more and more difficult” refuses the comfort of plateau. It suggests compounding stakes: aging, memory, fatigue, and the accumulating weight of what she’s already said. It’s also an ethic. David implies that ease can be the enemy of honest prose; if it feels too fluent, it may be rehearsed, self-copying, dead. Difficulty becomes a compass pointing toward originality and precision, the unglamorous labor of making appetite, place, and history feel newly real.