... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubio...us ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Central heating, French rubber goods, and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man's ingenuity in transforming necessity into art..., and of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Talleyrand said that two things are essential in life: to give good dinners and to keep on fair terms with women. As the years pas...s and fires cool, it can become unimportant to stay always on fair terms either with women or one's fellows, but a wide and sensitive appreciation of fine flavours can still abide with us, to warm our hearts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us. We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I prefer not to have among my guests two people or more, of any sex, who are in the first wild tremours of love. It is better t...o invite them after their new passion has settled, has solidified into a quieter reciprocity of emotions. (It is also a waste of good food, to serve it to new lovers.)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aging process is a part of most of our lives, and it remains one we try to ignore until it seems to pounce upon us. We evade a...ll its signals. We stay blandly unprepared for some of its obnoxious effects, even though we have coped with the cracked voices and puzzling glands of our emerging natures, and have been guided no matter how clumsily through budding love-pains, morning sickness, and hot flashes. We do what our mentors teach us to do, but few of us acknowledge that the last years of our lives, if we can survive to live them out, are as physically predictable as infancy's or those of our full flowering. This seems impossible, but it is true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have formed a strong theory that there is no such thing as "turning into" a Nasty Old Man or an Old Witch. I believe that such p...eople, and of course they are legion, were born nasty and witchlike, and that by the time they were about five years old they had hidden their rotten bitchiness and lived fairly decent lives until they no longer had to conform to rules of social behavior, and could revert to their original horrid natures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I like old people when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the t...imelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, toget...her. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »