It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it

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

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.

I cannot count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

Life is hard, we say. An oyster's life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation.

On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell.

When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.