When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.

The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.

I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.

... living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerfully strange things to humans.

... there can be no more shameless carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.

Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions.

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.