Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

Gilbert has established herself as a straight-up storyteller who dares us into adventures of worldly discovery, and this novel stands as a winning next act. “The Signature of All Things” is a bracing homage to the many natures of genius and the inevitable progress of ideas, in a world that reveals its best truths to the uncommonly patient minds.

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.