“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.

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 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.

We face an essential need to reach a definition of terrorism that will enjoy wide international agreement, thus enabling international operations against terrorist organizations.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

The essential thing is to run period! And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences… essential to that institution’s ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.