Salty Quotes

“Hope is something worth practising. Hope makes each day go down as easy as a cold martini or a cup of gazpacho or a spicy shrimp salad or a big, hearty roast chicken shared amongst friends. I wish we were having this conversation in this real life, but i am grateful to have had this feast with you all the same. And I will let Maya Angelou give us a benediction from that stage in New York decades ago. Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older, that's the truth of it. They honour their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It's serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail, and maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs. Anybody can have that. I mean, in truth. That's what I write. What it really is like. I'm just telling a very simple story, feast by feast, friend by friend, nightcap by nightcap, hope by hope. Let's grow up together, just telling our simple stories over a good meal, learning from those who've done it before us.”
― Alissa Wilkinson, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women

“We are dropped down into a broken world, where humans hurt one another. To love the world, we need oases where we can retreat and be renewed. Those oases include art and music and poetry and dinner tables and cocktail parties and perhaps, most importantly, friendship. That’s why friendship is everything to Arendt. It’s the strongest of the oases, the one that keeps us from turning inward on ourselves and away from the horrors of the world. It is where we learn to appreciate others, not for the way they are the same as us, but for how they are different from us. It is where we overcome the horror of isolation but also avoid becoming just another face in the crowd, lost in the collective. Friendship is the connective tissue that builds us into a true society and saves us from being taken by totalitarianism.”
― Alissa Wilkinson, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women