Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she, and may start at any moment, after the first year, to lay eggs where before he spent his sexual energies in being exceptionally masculine.

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

It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.

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.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

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