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"Language simply isn't expansive enough to capture the essence of a practice as corporeal or sensory--not to mention brimming with as much history, tradition, memory, and nostalgia--as cooking." (18)

"I've come to think of recipes not as rigid prescriptions but as 'rituals that promise transformation,' as the poet and pie-maker Kate Lebo so beautifully put it." (19)

— Good Things by Samin Nosrat (Page 18 - 19)

"I now consider a good life to be one where I feel deeply rootes in both my community and the natural world. It's one where beauty and pleasure are paramount, and I do meaningful work that creates joy and connection. A good life is one where time--and its fast compnaion, attention--are the most precious gifts I can give or receive. The beauty of cooking is that it's a vessel for both time and attention."

— Good Things by Samin Nosrat (Page 16)

"We do not become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. It's hard for us to believe we have any significance as individuals. After all, when we get sick, the show goes on and the audience doesn't even notice. Yet collectively, we are indispensable and sometimes magnificent." (18)

"You breathe in--fast, deep full--and then spin the breath out, carefully releasing it at just the right rate, like fishing line." (31)

"Choral singers are followers, in the best sense of the word. Not mindless automatons, but people who listen, digest, and process a wealth of information, then execute the directions as understood." (68)

"What does it matter? How could it possibly matter, whether we sing a chord in tune? I say it does. I say that each passionate, precise note is an act of defiance and a prayer. Human creatures can create, destroy, or sink into numbness. These seem to me the choices." (178)

— How Can We Keep From Singing by Joan Oliver Goldsmith (Page 18 - 178)

"no one is obliged to learn something from loss." (5) "This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they're still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby." (6) "the most practical thing I have learned is the power of the present tense. The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float." (6)

"I am holding these losses as an aunt might, as if they are familiar but not quite mine. As if they are books I will be allowed to return to some centralized sadness library." (7)

— Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (Page 5 - 7)

"Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell, and people like me now, we don't know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won't judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in this tangible way. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight." (34)

— Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (Page 34)