“Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.”

“When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie,' which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”

“It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical”

“Come to think of it, she seemed awfully sure about those ten minutes: it was the first thing out of her mouth. As if nine minutes would be too short or eleven minutes too long. Like cooking spaghetti al dente.”

“No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end andlearn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.”

“1971 was the year of spaghetti. In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life...This is the story from the Year of Spaghetti, AD 1971.”

“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way were doing now? I mean, we think about its everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, the complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.”