“Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat?Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.”

“The Eating Guidelines1. Eat when you are hungry.2. Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.3. Eat without distractions. Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.4. Eat what your body wants.5. Eat until you are satisfied. 6. Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.7. Eat with enjoyment, gusto, and pleasure.”

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Eat pudding. Books are good. Eat pudding. If kids read a lot. Eat pudding. They'll get so they can think clearly. Eat pudding. And if enough kids read and think. Eat pudding. We will have world peace. Eat pudding. Thank you very much. Eat pudding.”

“Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.”

“Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.”

“Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.”