“We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.”

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

It’s so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won’t be awake for another five hours, but I can’t help feeling that we’re sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?

This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks. For my money, they are the bird.

The most indespensible ingredient of all good home cooking: love for those you are cooking for.

I started a grease fire at McDonald’s – threw a match in the cook’s hair.

Woe to the cook whose sauce has no sting.

I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks. Most of those cookbooks don’t even tell you how to get a steak ready, how to bake biscuits or an apple pie.

I was sixty-six years old. I still had to make a living. I looked at my social security check of 105 dollars and decided to use that to try to franchise my chicken recipe. Folks had always liked my chicken.

The food I’ve liked in my time is American country cookin’.

I’m thankful for women. I think women are more intelligent than men. Also, without women, there would be no cookies.