Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
I’m never going to tell the reader what to believe; I’m going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.
You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers.
I’ve never gotten over high school, to the extent that I’m still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.
Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.
This will be Great Mam’s last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.