Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301)

In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301)