gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.

Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom.

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist

Good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit.

Too few of us, perhaps, feel that breaking of bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, mean more than satisfaction of a need. We make such primal things as casual as tunes heard over a radio, forgetting the mystery and strength in both.