For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books . . . finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams . . . .

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.

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.

Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.

In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.

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.

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.