The Telling Room Quotes

“In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“After the cafes of Paris with their exquisite wines and creamy fromages, crepes and steak tartare-- screaming Adore me!-- Madrid was these store-bought hunks of unyielding cheese and brick-hard baguettes, consumed in leafless Buen Retiro Park.ll Madrid, dressed as it was, tasting as it did, prideful as hell, didn't care what you thought about it on your junior-year backpacking trip. That was your problem.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“There's immeasurable glory in riding a tractor. You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it's opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat, 'Is it time?' And the wheat says, 'Yes, friend, it's time.' And then you know to begin the harvest.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“A story is time itself, boxed and compressed.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [...]”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“We all had our secrets, and maybe the most terrible of them was that we weren't exactly who we thought we were, who we said we were, who we dreamed of being, that we were divided and at war and half made of self-mythologies, too. Sometimes on that staircase spiraling up from the darkness, we met ourselves coming up into the light, not recognizing ourselves or what we might do next.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“At the same time, Ambrosio had given me a brief glimpse of a different, compelling sort of life, a life in which there seemed to be more time for family and conversation, for stories and food, a life I was desperate to lead now as an antidote to my own. It was okay to squander a day, a week, a year, sitting in that telling room, summoning ghosts, because no one saw it as squandering. No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was: strolling. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like "rushing," or "hustling," or "guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic [...], while she, the Etch a Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“He’d taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“This again was the curious thing about Ambrosio, his willingness to live fully inside the moment, whatever its virtue or folly, without regard for the future.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Didn’t anybody respect tradition, making food by hand, the slow way? Hadn’t anyone frittered away a Sunday afternoon at the bodega gorging themselves on the bounty of the land—the sparkling wine, the beautifully constructed chorizo?”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance—and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs. Admittedly,”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Divinity, not machines. Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“the gossip mill surrounding her and her possible suitors was always grinding. The rumors were so pervasive that she could barely converse with a boy before there were inventions of a torrid affair. This affliction, for that’s what it really was, seemed to place Rosa on the defensive, slowly removing her from some life she might have dreamed for herself, for to have fallen in love, or even let herself go for a night, was to have fulfilled someone else’s pernicious prophecy of her, when quite the opposite was true.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“New Father will go glottal, scrotal, and ballistic on someone driving twenty-seven in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone when Baby is astronauted in the backseat.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“You can count on your enemies,” said Emilia now, “but sometimes it’s the one who smiles who keeps you up at night.” There”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“on his off nights he could forever be the shadowy, multifarious man who blew in and out on a dangerous breeze, sipping whisky before pollinating another dark place with his cowboy mysteriousness. In”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“You could travel mile after empty mile seeing nobody, nothing—just the rugged Meseta—and then happen upon an ancient village of a hundred homes, all conjoined and crowded together, enjambed and encircling a church, a castle, each village with its Franco-era frontón, linked, for better or worse, in prayer, in drink, in song. I”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Here where vegetables are scarce—or, it seems, scarcely eaten—there are times when ham (gorgeous, fantastic ham!) is the starter, the vegetable, and the main dish, all in one.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies.” I”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Consider the chicken,” he said. “Today we have industrialized animals. A chicken needs to be cheap to be competitive in the marketplace. So the industrial chicken has a life that lasts forty-two days between its hatching and its sacrifice. They flood the chicken with twenty-three hours of light a day so that the chicken constantly feeds, and then they give it one hour of rest. They do this for six weeks, then the chickens are put on a conveyor belt and either gassed or have their heads chopped off and are immediately dumped in scalding water, after which the dead body is sent to market. “On the other hand, the traditional chicken used to take one and a half years from hatching to sacrifice. You would see the chicken every day and speak to her, and you would share with her certain aspects of your own life. The chicken was your friend; she understood you. You loved each other. She knew she was going to have a happy life and tried to give you her best while you gave her yours. She knew her destiny, that eventually she would make a gift of her life to feed your family. But you honored each other. The chicken lived at home with you, and you ate her at home.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“When you put something alive in your mouth,” he said, “it makes you more alive. The people who produce wine are mostly pedantic and stupid,” he continued, jabbing the air with his glass, sloshing the dregs. “They don’t make wine; wine makes itself, God makes wine.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“don’t know why this little cheese conquered so many,” he said softly. “But if you asked me the secret, I’d say it was because we made it in our home, the old way, the way it had been made for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the United States you don’t know what it’s like to have old flavors, flavors from the past, from centuries before. But we live with them every day here.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese