Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody

"If I go back to my earliest memories, I find that I have always likes eating. I cannot pinpoint exactly my first gastronomic ecstasies, but there is no doubt as to the identity of my first preffered cook: my own grandmother."
"I love my wife, as I have always loved the beutiful objects in my life. That is the way it is. ... A work of art has a soul. It cannot be reduced to a simple mineral existence...; ... considering Anna the most beautiful work of all..."

"People don't really know what desire is, true desire, when it hypnotizes you and takes hold of your entire soul, surrounds it utterly, in such a way that you become demented, possessed, ready to do anything for a tiny crumb ..."
"The grilled sardines filled the entire neighborhood with their ashy marine aroma. ... Meat is virile, powerful; fish is strange and cruel. It comes from another world, a secret ocean that will never yield to us; it bears witness to the absolute relativity of our existence, and yet it offers itself to us through the ephemeral relevation of unknown realms."
"... and every time I would forget more definitively that I was born for trees. The countryside... My green cathedral... It was there that my heart has sung its most fervent hymns, taht my eyes learned the secrets of looking, my taste buds the flavor of game and of the vegetable garden, and my nose the elegance of fragrances."

"When your body is free of the constrains of winter, when at last you can feel the caress of a breeze against your naked skin, offered to the world, blatantly open to it, in an ecstasy of freedom regained ... In the motionless air, saturated with the buzzing of invisible insects, time stands still... The poplar trees along the towpaths sing to the breezes a melody of verdant rustling, between light and shimmering along... A cathedral, yes, a cathedral of light-splattered greenery encircled me with its immediate, clear beauty."