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"The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture."
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"On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners."
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Personal Development
"The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points."
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Personal Development
"The greatest tragedy to ever happen to a nation is not the incidences of war or terrorism. It's when more bookshops close down and more drinking bars are opened to replace them!"
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Personal Development
"There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever."
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Personal Development
"Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence."
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Personal Development
"The pure modernist is merely a snob, he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion."
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Personal Development
"Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope... but darkness wins."
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Personal Development
"Without the library, you have no civilization."
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Personal Development
"Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French."
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Personal Development
"My mom loved rock n' roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around. He liked classical music and Duke Ellington."
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Personal Development
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"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."
Food
"Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine."
Evolution
"Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again."
Nature
"My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition."
Anxiety
"Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward."
Imagination
"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."
Environment
"I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification."
Change
"Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist."
Life
"Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share."
Behavior
"Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically."
Nature
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