The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

The things men come to eat when they are alone are, I suppose, not much stranger than the men themselves.... A writer years ago told me of living for five months on hen mash.

Hunger is more than a problem of belly and guts, and ... the satisfying of it can and must and does nourish the spirit as well as the body.

since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.

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.

old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.

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