“Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.”

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

The crowd is not us. It never is.

In normal life, ‘simplicity’ is synonymous with ‘easy to do,’ but when a chef uses the word, it means ‘takes a lifetime to learn.’

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can’t do.

May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.

It is remarkable that men, when they differ in what they think considerable, will be apt to differ in almost everything else; their difference begets contradiction; contradiction begets heat; heat quickly rises into resentment, rage, and ill-will; thus they differ in affections, as they differ in judgment.

Right now, i had everything i could ask for. It wasn’t a long list, but it was a very satisfying one, starting with the love of my life back in my arms.

An acting teacher once told me, ‘Greet everything with yes… Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.’

My father is my idol, so I always did everything like him. He used to work two jobs and still come home happy every night.

I’m sure that I don’t know everything I want to know. I have so much more to learn.

In everything give thanks

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.

We achieve everything by our efforts alone. Our fate is not decided by an almighty God. We decide our own fate by our actions. You have to gain mystery over yourself. It is not a matter of sitting back and accepting.