If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is.

Metz's Perfection chronicles with lapidary precision one woman's climb back to happiness after not just a spouse's death, but also the shocking recognition that her life before that death was not what she had thought it was. The journey is a painful one, but Ms. Metz is much the stronger for having survived to recount it.

Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and an Internet connection can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be.

It's sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence.

There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance.

Physically it's exhausting to cook every night. Existentially speaking, I have so much more energy having that time to myself in this project, this gift to myself at the end of the day. Even if it didn't go smoothly, it was still a gift.

There are times with your friends when you just have to put their whole mess out of your mind for a while.