"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
— C.S. Lewis

"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."
— Julia Child

"We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie."
— David Mamet (Boston Marriage)

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted."
— Judith Martin

"Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March.

.........

I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.

I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.

I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

I am thawing."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry."
— Mark Strand (Reasons for Moving)

"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need."
— Marya Hornbacher

"My favorite animal is steak."
— Fran Lebowitz

"That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious."
— Ruth Reichl

"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. "
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it."
— Anthony Bourdain

""You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backwards and sad.""
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason."
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)

"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."
— Sophia Loren

"Eating, and hospitality in general, is a communion, and any meal worth attending by yourself is improved by the multiples of those with whom it is shared."
— Jesse Browner

"There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. Of course, my binge eating was just a cover-up for the larger issue: Trying to fill the emptiness"
— Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK) (Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect)

"I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head."
— Roman Payne (Cities & Countries)

"And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:

"Your seeds shall live in my body,
"And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
"And your fragrance shall be my breath,
"And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.""
— Kahlil Gibrán

"In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations."
— Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses)

"A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife."
— Ruth Reichl (Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise)

"We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)

"I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure"
— Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)

"Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)