“To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.”

“The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.”

“Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.”

“The power-hungry individual follows a path to his own destruction.”

“Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made - imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell... Meals' ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominos. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on toast; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup, studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness. This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking.”

“Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.”

“Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone ... It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton." - Ann Patchett, "Dinner for One, Please, James”