Salt Cod Quotes

Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. "Va callar!" (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge. ~ Mark Kurlansky

The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish". ~ Mark Kurlansky

Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Keep your finger on the pulse of society, take controversies with a grain of salt, lick your finger and then lift it to the wind; always know what is going on, my friend, so this world can never steer you wrong again. ~ Criss Jami

It is naive to think you know someone so well.

To think that whatever time you have shared in knowing their

habits, their history, their stories, their weaknesses, their

strengths, their wounds, and deepest corners of their heart could ever sum them up-- is unjust.
It is a shame to be unaware of the shifts and changes that happen every day, every moment, right before your eyes. The little crinkles around her eyes that get ever-so-slightly deeper and wiser. The silver linings of her hair. The wonders of time and how they show their presence in such ways. You may think that a flower is simply a flower. A flower that looks and smells just as simply as it always has. Or that the ocean is simply salt water and blue. The flower is always moving, changing, blossoming, and giving life to the birds and the bees. The ocean's tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon. The currents change direction. And depending on how the sun hits the water, the colors and shades of blue are in fact, infinite. Everything around you and everyone is always changing. Take time to smell the roses. Take time to watch the tide. Take time to see your love with new eyes. It would be a shame to miss it. ~ Kayko Tamaki

When you fall in love, you will carve out your heart and throw it into the deepest ocean. You will be all in - blood and salt. ~ Kim Liggett

If a man were to spend years of his life trying to discover the chemical constituency of salt water without bothering to find out what has already been said on the subject in any elementary chemistry book, we should say that he was making very imperfect use of the resources available to us. Similarly, can it not be said that people, worrying themselves sick over their individual frustrations, constantly suffering from petty irritations and hypertensions, are making extremely imperfect use of the available human resources of adjustment when they fail to strengthen and quiet themselves through contact with literature, music, painting, and the other arts? ~ S.I. Hayakawa

We have become so accustomed to hearing everyone claim that his product is the best in the world, or the cheapest, that we take all such statements with a grain of salt. ~ Robert Collier

Let us remember that we are all Indians eating Indian grain and salt, and living on the dumb Indian masses. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

A brick could be used to sell pepper to people in the salt mines. So while you're busy selling pepper to the salty and sweaty workers, I'll be selling them bottled water. ~ Jarod Kintz

From the elevator, Mabel watched the old woman's bare feet hobbling away, a trail of salt and the lace hem of her nightgown left in her wake like sea foam. ~ Libba Bray

When I am a woman - O, when I am
a woman,
my wells of salt brim and brim,
poems force the lock of my throat. ~ Denise Levertov

Don't spend your entire life building a ship, without ever tasting the salt of the ocean. ~ Alexander Den Heijer

Some mornings ... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me. ~ Jennifer Egan

I have become more successful in my forties, but that pales in comparison with the other gifts of my current decade
how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion. I prepare myself tubs of hot salt water at the end of the day, and soak my tired feet. I run interference for myself when I am working, like the wife of a great artist would
'No, I'm sorry, she can't come. She's working hard these days, and needs a lot of down time.' I live by the truth that 'No' is a complete sentence. I rest as a spiritual act. ~ Anne Lamott

The Man Who Ate Everything features a particularly good essay on salt, finding that it's only harmful to around 8% of the world's population. This should be mentioned whenever someone does that annoying health-kick thing of declaring, 'Oh, we never salt our food now.' Consider it revenge for the tasteless gruel they've just made you eat. HESTON ~ Neil Davey

A wood that smells of the sea. ~ Nina George

Darcy closed her eyes. Their lips met, and she breathed in the scent of the sun-heated tar beneath them and the salt of Imogen's skin. She felt the rumble of the traffic below traveling up through the building and into her spine, her fingertips, her tongue. ~ Scott Westerfeld

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs, had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to live, and now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away with their furnace!
I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing. ~ Alan Gratz

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite.

Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, e ~ Jon Krakauer

Old and alone, thought Pelletier. Just one of thousands of old men on their own. Like the machine célibataire. Like the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or like the bachelor who, when he returns from a trip at light speed, finds the other bachelors grown old or turned into pillars of salt. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of machines célibataires crossing an amniotic sea each day, on Alitalia, eating spaghetti al pomodoro and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed, positive that the paradise of retirees isn't in Italy (or, therefore, anywhere in Europe), bachelors flying to the hectic airports of Africa or America, burial ground of elephants. The great cemeteries at light speed. I don't know why I'm thinking this, thought Pelletier. Spots on the wall and spots on the skin, thought Pelletier, looking at his hands. Fuck the Serb. ~ Roberto Bolano

We are imperfect creatures created with egotistical defects, insecurities and an incomprehensible desire for perfection and the excessive use of social media feeds the raging fires within, most of the time adding salt to wounds we never knew existed and at times creating new ones. ~ Aysha Taryam

Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker. ~ Margaret Visser

Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don't grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot's wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

When the nettle is young, the leaves make excellent greens; when it grows old it has filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Cloth made from the nettle is as good as that made from hemp. Chopped up, the nettle is good for poultry; pounded, it is good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle mixed with the fodder of animals gives a luster to their skin; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow dye. It makes, however, excellent hay, as it can be cut twice in a season. And what does the nettle need? very little soil, no care, no culture; except that the seeds fall as fast as they ripen, and it is difficult to gather them; that is all. If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle! My friends, remember this, that there are no weeds, and no worthless men, there are only bad farmers. ~ Victor Hugo

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk with the mind ~ Henry Stephens Salt

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot. ~ Mary Roach

1/2 cup sugar, 1 cup salt, and 1 gallon of water. To this brine you can add spices and seasoning such as peppercorns, cloves, garlic, herbs, or any other flavorful aromatics. ~ Jason Logsdon

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go. ~ Pablo Neruda

If I apply a magnetic pulse on salt water - that's your brains by the way - it'll generate electric currents, and the electric current in the brain can erase a migraine headache. ~ Robert Fischell

Let me love you, girl who came from the sea. Let us swim to the bottom of the ocean where we can be anything and where no one can find us. We will grow gills and breathe salt water. We will sprout fins and scales and make our home in underground caves. Or else will drown there. But either way, i will be happy ~ Carolee Dean

Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Nowadays, food needs to be healthy, local, sustainable and not filled with too much fat, salt or sugar. It should be slow-cooked and seasonal. That's my vision. ~ Alain Ducasse

I know the hard ground and the taste of the salt water I'm made of and the way even getting out of bed feels impossible some days. I know how some moments there's not even enough air.

I know the desperate and the bargains you want to make with the universe and every last prayer you've prayed to gods you don't even believe in.

But stupid? No, love.

Not stupid. Not you. You are infinitely, impossibly, beautifully human. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

FACT FILE Excess salt can cause water retention and increase blood pressure. Restrict salt to 6 g, roughly about 1 teaspoon, per day. Substitute extra salt with herbs and spices such as oregano, basil, coriander and parsley, or use seasonings like lemon, garlic or pepper. ~ Namita Jain

The Kitchen





Half a papaya and a palmful of sesame oil;
lately, your husband's mind has been elsewhere.

Honeyed dates, goat's milk;
you want to quiet the bloating of salt.

Coconut and ghee butter;
he kisses the back of your neck at the stove.

Cayenne and roasted pine nuts;
you offer him the hollow of your throat.

Saffron and rosemary;
you don't ask him her name.

Vine leaves and olives;
you let him lift you by the waist.

Cinnamon and tamarind;
lay you down on the kitchen counter.

Almonds soaked in rose water;
your husband is hungry.

Sweet mangoes and sugared lemon;
he had forgotten the way you taste.

Sour dough and cumin;
but she cannot make him eat, like you. ~ Warsan Shire

Fast food is inexpensive, convenient, and it tastes good. I'm all in favor of that. My problem is how heavily processed it is - how full of salt, fat, and sugar it is. ~ Eric Schlosser