I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Teeth. What goddamn things they were. We had to eat. And eat and eat again. We are all disgusting, doomed to our dirty little tasks. Eating and farting and scratching and smiling and celebrating holidays.
Never, never eat anything out of a carton, even if you are at home alone with the shades drawn. Doing so is wicked and constitutes Miss Manners’ one exception to the generally genial rule about violations of etiquette not counting if you don’t get caught.
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
As she is a woman, and as she is an American, she was dieting.
It’s OK to be fat. So you’re fat. Just be fat and shut up about it.
Food is the most primitive form of comfort.
All food starting with p is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, pizza, pastry.
There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.
What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?
All recipes are built on the belief that somewhere at the beginning of the chain there is a cook who did not use them. This is the great nostalgia of our cuisine, ever invoking an absent mother-cook who once laid her hands on the body of the world for us and worked it into food. The promise of every cookbook is that it offers a way back onto her lap.
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
I don’t mind that I’m fat. You still get the same money.
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
The body is the soul. We ignore its aches, its pains, its eruptions, because we fear the truth. The body is God’s messenger.
I just can’t stand to look plain, ’cause that don’t fit my personality. I may be a very artificial-looking person, but the good news is, I’m very real on the inside.
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
What’s beautiful is all that counts, pal. That’s all that counts.
It is because we don’t know who we are, because we are unaware that the kingdom of heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human.
Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew.
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
