“I like birthday cake. It’s so symbolic. It’s a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just ‘Happy birthday!’ because it’s this emblem of childhood and a happy day.”

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,

It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.

I am not happy, help me — like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

Pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.” – Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

The thing I’ve noticed about life is that it just keeps coming at you. And it can be a real bummer. What you need to remember is that you’re not alone.

You can walk away from your mistakes You can turn your back on what you do Just a little smile is all it takes And you can have your cake and eat it too.

Good health, peace of mind, being outdoors, camaraderie – those are all wonderful things that come to you when running. But for me, the real pull of running – the proverbial icing on the cake – has always been racing.

Celebration is life’s frosting: isn’t frosting the very best part of the cake?

Despite my inability to qualify to qualify in South Africa, I did really appreciate the support I got from the IOC particularly the Olympic Solidarity, members of the ICF, my own National Olympic Committee, friends and athletes from the Slalom Community.

He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of the narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul.

Rich people believe “You can have your cake and eat it too.” Middle-class people believe “Cake is too rich, so I’ll only have a little piece.” Poor people don’t believe they deserve cake, so they order a doughnut, focus on the hole, and wonder why they have “nothing.”

My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.