Table Of Life Quotes

You aren't doing it to me. I'm not falling into that trap." "What would you like to bet on that? A thousand?" "A thousand dollars?" Tag nodded. "Yes. I have to go big. Have you see what college costs these days? I have to make sure those girls get into Ivy League schools or they'll end up on the pole. I can't have my girls on the pole, man. Chris Rock was right. I got a mission in life now and it's keeping my baby girls away from skeevy dudes who go to strip clubs." "You go to strip clubs."

"Exacty. No way I want my baby girls around any dude like me. Or you. Or Alex's kid. I see the way he looks at my girls." Tag eyed him as though sizing him up. It made Ten nervous. Tag slapped the table. "Two thousand. I bet you two grand you're getting married at the end of this. Come on, man. ~ Lexi Blake

I sat at a table in my shadowy kitchen, staring down a bottle of Boone's Farm
Hard Lemonade, when a magic fluctuation hit. My wards shivered and died, leaving my home stripped of its defenses. The TV flared into life, unnaturally loud in the empty house.
I raised my eyebrow at the bottle and bet it that another urgent bulletin was on.
The bottle lost.
"Urgent bulletin!" Margaret Chang announced. "The Attorney General advises all citizens that any attempt at summoning or other activities resulting in the appearance of a supernaturally powerful being can be hazardous to yourself and to other citizens."
"No shit," I told the bottle. ~ Ilona Andrews

There was a lot of stress on both of us, and one night we had a fight over some detail about the house. The cause is lost to me, but I know I got really mad-mad enough to knock my papers off the kitchen table, and then take a bowl of macaroni and cheese and fling it against the wall.
That's very mad, especially for me.
I also remember the solution. Sitting alone after Chris went to bed, I called a girlfriend and poured out my heart. I knew that I had gone too far, but I didn't know how to fix it.
"You love him, right?" she asked finally.
"Yes."
"Then go in there, wake him up, and give him some hot sex."
So I did. We didn't talk, but we sure did make love.
Chris seemed apprehensive when he left the next morning. I later found out that he couldn't quite figure out why his mad fiancée would come to him for hot sex and no talk. He was afraid he would come home and I would be gone.
He didn't mention it, though, because he didn't want to risk a talk when maybe I was over it. If he was wrong and I was gone, he would find me and fix it. Avoiding a "talk" was worth the risk of damage control later. He was his usual confident self, taking life as it came and handling the consequences IF they came.
On my side, I would have panicked if I thought he was going to leave me. ~ Taya Kyle

And when the Unwanted Visitor arrives, you will hear it say: "It is fair to ask: 'Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?' But now, in this final second of your life on Earth, I am going to tell you what I saw: I found the house clean, the table laid, the fields plowed, the flowers smiling. I found each thing in its proper place, precisely as it should be. You understood that small things are responsible for great changes. "And for that reason, I will carry you up to Paradise. ~ Paulo Coelho

I do not know how long more I shall live. I am already an old man. But now that I have you, I want to enjoy every minute of my remaining life. I want to eat your Ambrosia & drink your Nectar till the last day of my life. I hope to live ten years longer to enjoy every minute of you to which I am entitled. If you treat me well & continue to make me happy, who knows, when I die, I might even leave the company to you. Imagine, you, my darling, as Chairman of the Board! Then you can sit at the Board Meeting: with your cup on the table & ask all the Directors to lick it1 Haw! Haw! Haw!"[MMT] ~ Nicholas Chong

Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin. ~ Alexandre Dumas

A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life ~ Honore De Balzac

There had come to him one of those moments of quiet despair that lie in wait for even the happiest. Stealthy-footed they leap upon us, as we walk along the street, as we sit at evening with fruit and wine upon the table and laughter on our lips, as we wake suddenly from sleep in the hour before dawn; neither at our work nor our play nor our prayers are we safe, those moments can leap at any time out of the blackness around human life and suddenly the colors that we have nailed to our mast are there no longer and all that we have grasped is dust. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

1. The face tears up from laughter, and there is not flesh and soul, but a continuous smile of awareness.
2. A ghost is a hologram record of the projection of the universe, once generated by an accident of chaos, living in reality. This spirit is like the same memoirs and nostalgia of the past. This is a retro record of bygone times, traveling in empty eternity and nonsense, feeling only insensibility. A time-space film of time and space existing in time, in the depressing eternity of reality, in the void of consciousness of loneliness. A ghost who sees is not evolutionary progress, but the life cycle of a temporary transformation, rotting from the depravity of people.
3. Loneliness is a catcher of erotic dreams.
4. Careerism is a children's entertainment, attraction mini-golf of self-motivation and discipline.
5. Death from the dust of all the dead and dust of memories. Fear is all out of the darkness of the subconscious of billions of threads of manipulation.
6. Love relationships as a table hockey attraction, and the puck is the fault.
7. Laziness as an attraction a children's rocking chair is an illusion of movement.
8. The idea appeared in a mirror maze and it is reflected in all the mirrors, that is, the opinion that the source cannot be found because it is hidden from your eyes. You see that opinion is a sect. ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend.

The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences.

I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my ~ Masha Gessen

And I grew up in a close family, and I always knew I wanted one of those too. So, I cannot promise you life is gonna run perfect. I cannot tell the future. What I can say is, what we have when you and me are tossin' a ball or mannin' the grill or sittin' at the table doin' your homework, that means something to me. It's important to me. And when something's important, you take care of it. ~ Kristen Ashley

I, like a lot of people who are creative, need to step away. I can't have stuff to write about if I don't have a life. If I talk to people, hang out with my friends and hang out with my husband, I feel like I have better things to bring to the table. ~ Carrie Underwood

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life. ~ J M G Le Clezio

Here," Trey says, fumbling for his cell phone on the bedside table. "You should call me.
Ben turns and looks at him, a small smile still playing around his lips. "Oh, should I? What's your number?"
Trey tells him, and Ben enters it into is phone, and then he takes Trey's and enters his number. "Okay," Ben says a little cautiously, "well, we'd love to have you come for a meeting. Are you seriously considering U of C? Even after what happened?"
"Oh yeah. I totally am. "What's your name again?"
Ben laughs and tells him.
I frown. Trey knows U of C is a private school. Mucho big bucks. But hey ... there's always the power of morphine to make you forget about the minor details of your life, like living above a restaurant that struggles monthly to pay bills, and considering returning to the place where some lunatic outsider came in and fucking shot you because you're gay. ~ Lisa McMann

No, my advocates, my angels with sadist eyes, this is the beginning of my life, or the end. So I lean affirmation across the cafe table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile. But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said. ~ Elizabeth Smart

Though he had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.
[Mr Harrington's washing] ~ W. Somerset Maugham

You don't let your feelings run around and jump into someone else's hand." Mercury made a fist. "You grab on to your own life and push it around where you want it to go."

Mercury believed she had her life firmly in place beneath her tongue, and she didn't spit it out here and there, in bits and pieces diffusing its power. She had even taken a new name, changing it from Anna to Mercury after er granddaughter brought home a copy of the periodic table in the eighth grade and explained it to her: "An element is a substance that can't be broken down into simpler substances."

"That's my story," Mercury told Charlene. running her thick forefinger across the chart. "I'm all of a piece."

Charlene opened her mouth to object, to explain that her grandmother could never be one of the chemical elements, assigned an atomic number and measured for atomic weight, but Mercury presided over the kitchen like a force of nature. Charlene's words were snatched from her mind before they ever made it to her vocal chords. She imagined they were pulled into the woman's energy field, the electric air surrounding Mercury's body like her own personal atmosphere. ~ Susan Power

I plant my elbows on the kitchen table, prop up my chin and think: When the hell did the compass needle get out of whack and lead my life astray? ~ Haruki Murakami

I truly hate being a guest in someone's home ... Worst of all, you have to 'make nice' at all hours. I don't want someone across the table from me while I'm eating my breakfast. I don't want to share the newspaper and I don't want to talk to anyone at the end of the day. If I were interested in that shit, I'd be married again by now and put a permanent end to all the peace and quiet. ~ Sue Grafton

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Trying to remember old dreams. A voice. Who came in.
And meanwhile the rain, all day, all evening,
quiet steady sound. Before it grew too dark
watched the blue iris leaning under the rain,
the flame of the poppies guttered and went out.
A voice. Almost recalled. There have been times
the gods entered. Entered a room, a cave?
A long enclosure where I was, the fourth wall of it
too distant or too dark to see. The birds are silent,
no moths at the lit windows. Only a swaying rosebush
pierces the table's reflection, raindrops gazing from it.
There have been hands laid on my shoulders.
What has been said to me,
how has my life replied?
The rain, the rain ... ~ Denise Levertov

Be wary of feeling as through there is not enough room at the table. Oftentimes a female Chinese-American might feel as through she is in competition with another Chinese-American woman writer of the same generation. A writer friend of mine calls it the "There Can Only Be One ... " syndrome. This isn't "Survivor." The more good writers, of all walks of life and all ethnicities and persuasions, the better. ~ ZZ Packer

What was it, she wondered, this need to brandish his shiny new metropolitan life at her? As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her. Even so this would be the third girlfriend, lover, whatever, that she had met in the last nine months, Dexter presenting them up to her like a dog with a fat pigeon in his mouth. Was it some kind of some sick revenge for something? Because she got a better degree than him? Didn't he know what this was doing to her, sat at table nine with their groins jammed in each other's faces? ~ David Nicholls

The pleasant life is not produced by continual drinking and dancing, nor sexual intercourse, nor rare dishes of sea food and other delicacies of a luxurious table. On the contrary, it is produced by sober reasoning which examines the motives for every choice and avoidance, driving away beliefs which are the source of mental disturbances. ~ Epicurus

Why is it so important for me to forgive that son-of-a-bitch? I'm not the one at fault here. It shouldn't be about me. He's the one that did wrong. Screw his feelings. He should feel like he's hated for what he did." Lisa added another used tissue to the growing pile on the table.
Lyn warmly smiled. "Forgiving Byron isn't for his sake, it's for yours. The block in your life's road can only be removed if you forgive him for what he did. If you don't, you'll just keep bumping into that block again and again. The life you live will be miserable. You'll never be able to break the chains of the past."
Lisa listened and let the words sink into her subconscious. She realized the only way to get to the end of the road was to take the first step. There was a block preventing her from moving forward in life. She had to find a way past it. ~ Dane Hatchell

It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul. ~ Epicurus

There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life's richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us. ~ Marcel Proust

At any given moment, four or five separate dialogues were going on across the table, but because people weren't necessarily talking to the person next to them, these dialogues kept intersecting with one another, causing abrupt shifts in the pairings of the speakers, so that everyone seemed to be taking part in all the conversations at the same time, simultaneously chattering away about his or her own life and eavesdropping on everyone else as well. Add to this the frequent interruptions from the children, the coming and goings of the different courses, the pouring of wine, the dropped plates, overturned glasses, and spilled condiments, the dinner began to resemble an elaborate, hastily improvised vaudeville routine. ~ Paul Auster

He sensed a lonely childhood on some great decaying plantation, an echoing 'Great House' slowly falling into disrepair and being encroached on by the luxuriance of the tropics. The parents dying, and the property being sold. The companionship of a servant or two and an equivocal life in lodgings in the capital. The beauty which was her only asset and the struggle against the shady propositions to be a 'governess', a 'companion', a 'secretary', all of which meant respectable prostitution. Then the dubious, unknown steps into the world of entertainment. The evening stint at the nightclub with the mysterious act which, among people dominated by magic, must have kept many away from her and made her a person to be feared. And then, one evening, the huge man with the grey face sitting at a table by himself. The promise that he would put her on Broadway. The chance of a new life, of an escape from the heat and the dirt and the solitude.

Bond turned brusquely away from the window. A romantic picture, perhaps. But it must have been something like that. ~ Ian Fleming

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book.
"It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest.
It's the boy from my dreams.
The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life.
I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey.
I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed.
Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade.
"You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it.
I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother.
I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, thoug ~ Alyson Noel

It's a great battle, and it really is a battle, and there are people from all walks of life, you know, never judge anybody at the table: A man can be the greatest poker player and he might know all the numbers, but he might get beaten by a really savvy kid who works in a grocery store; and that's what's so great about this game. ~ James Woods

Arising there, a china cabinet, its gifts enclosed in a hug.
Atop a pedestal table, hand-sanded and love-stained,
Mom's Christmas cactus trails and cascades in forest greens
awaiting pink-winged petals alighting in season, a crescendo of bloom framed an autumn-light meandering through remembrance like a dream. ~ Christina M. Ward

If you're going to give me the third degree," she tells him, "let's get it over with. Best to withhold food or water; water is probably best. I'll get thirsty before I get hungry."
He shakes his head in disbelief. "Do you really think I'm like that? Why would you think that?"
"I was taken by force, and you're keeping me here against my will," she says, leaning across the table toward him. She considers spitting in his face, but decides to save that gesture as punctuation for a more appropriate moment. "Imprisonment is still imprisonment, no matter how many layers of cotton you wrap it in." That makes him lean farther away, and she knows she's pushed a button. She remembers seeing those pictures of him back when he was all over the news, wrapped in cotton and kept in a bombproof cell.
"I really don't get you," he says, a bit of anger in his voice this time. "We saved your life. You could at least be a little grateful."
"You have robbed me, and everyone here, of their purpose. That's not salvation, that's damnation."
"I'm sorry you feel that way."
Now it's her turn to get angry. "Yes, you're sorry I feel that way, everyone's sorry I feel that way. Are you going to keep this up until I don't feel that way anymore?"
He stands up suddenly, pushing his chair back, and paces, fern leaves brushing his clothes. She knows she's gotten to him. He seems like he's about to storm out, but instead takes a deep breath and turns back to her.
"I know wha ~ Neal Shusterman

In all honesty, I don't envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the willful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, with the ecological memories of other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which the live. People don't realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for you sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek is not a revelation . . . When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem." The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sign and says: "But if you were any different you wouldn't be human. ~ Wu Ming-Yi

I had never in my life made something for someone else that wasn't a cup of tea. True, I could download a food app on my phone or leaf through one of the cookbooks Leander kept on the counter (though I didn't want to consider why he owned a copy of 38 Meals for Your Picky Toddler), but I was intelligent. I was capable. I could figure this out for myself.
An hour later, I nudged open the bedroom door, carrying a tray.
Watson sat up on his elbows. "What do you have there?" he asked, his voice coated in sleep.
"I made you breakfast."
"How domestic of you." He picked up his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. "That's - that's a rather large plate you've got there. Plates?"
"This is tray one of four," I said, placing it at the end of the bed.
He blinked at me. Perhaps he was still tired.
"Don't begin eating until you see all your options," I told him, and went off to fetch the next platter.
By the time I'd arranged it all on my coverlet to my satisfaction, Watson had roused himself appropriately. He'd put on one of my oversized sleep shirts - CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS - and poured himself a cup of coffee. That surprised me; he usually took tea.
"I need real caffeine to deal with this. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

She could make dream-worlds of her own – but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life: the unhappy-looking father seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others: she wanted some key that would enable her to understand and, in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught "real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew," she thought she should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books that she might learn for herself what wise men knew! ~ George Eliot

Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know - the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table - which you, specifically, is the real one? ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

In their world good manners and good sense prevail.
They don't imagine that to choose sensibly is to set a time-bomb under yourself.

They don't imagine you are ripe for the cutting, waiting for your chance at life.

They don't think of the wreckage an exploding life will cause… Settle down, feet under the table. She's a nice girl, he's a nice boy.

It's the clichés that cause the trouble. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts--it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear, and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857), the sexual reproduction of a sunflower for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, the silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators, and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and nonchalant, as darkness always was. ~ Marisha Pessl

As proof of her faith, my mother used to carry a samll leatherette Bible when she went to the First Chinese Baptist Church every Sunday. But later, after my mother lost her faith in God, that leatherette Bible would up wedged under a too-short table leg, a way for her to correct the imbalances of life. It's been there for over twenty years.
My mother pretends that Bible isn't there. Whenever anyone asks her what it's doing there, she says, a little too loudly, "Oh, this? I forgot." But I know she sees it. My mother is not the best housekeeper in the world, and after all these years that Bigle is still clean white...
My mother, she stills pay attention to it. That Bible under the table, I know she sees it. I remember seeing her write in it before she wedged it under.
I lift the table and slide the Bible out. I put the Bible on the table, flipping quickly through the pages, because I know it's there. On the page before the New Testament begins, there's a section called "Deaths," and that's where she wrote "Bing Hsu" lightly, in erasable pencil. ~ Amy Tan

A very big problem we have, as a human race, is our repeated failure to identify and to acknowledge all of the parts within us and we collectively and individually spend time and energy on denying so many inner natures, in a hot pursuit of moral codes and annoying virtues, that we have shrunken away within ourselves and left on top merely a malnourished container which feeds on static energy (knee jerk emotions, responses to stimuli, etc.). We are afraid of the creatures that roam the woodlands within us and we are afraid of the abandoned castles, eerie lakes, old songs, forgotten gazebos, all of which are established on the inside of the mind. There is maybe an old chair in a corner of a diner inside of your mind and you push it away and away and further away instead of going back to it, to sit down on it, to have a milkshake at that table. We have forged a worldwide culture wherein we are constantly struggling towards a moral good and it is supposed to be a daily attainment, and yet, nobody ever is good enough at the end of the day. And so we have cut off pieces of ourselves–arms and legs–because everything is nothing, or is wrong, in our bids to be worthy. No wonder we are all so lonely. We have amputated ourselves, and one another, in a bid to run away from the souls which take residence inside of us. Then we blame this loneliness on the world, or on other people's cowardice, or on the stupidity of the human race... we have failed to embrace the monsters within us long en ~ C. JoyBell C.

To grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table. ~ Storm Jameson

Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal. We would not need to go hunting for our connection to our food and the web of life that produces it. We would no longer need any reminding that we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and that what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world. I don't want to have to forage every meal. Most people don't want to learn to garden or hunt. But we can change the way we make and get our food so that it becomes food again - something that feeds our bodies and our souls. Imagine it: Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace. ~ Michael Pollan

I had the pleasure of dining with your
brother."
"Gregory? Really? You'd classify it as a pleasure?" But he was
grinning as he said it, and Honoria could instantly picture what life
must be like in the Bridgerton household: a great deal of teasing and
a great deal of love.
"He was most gracious to me," she said with a smile.
"Shall I tell you a secret?" Mr. Bridgerton murmured, and
Honoria decided that in his case, it was right and proper to listen to
gossip - he was an incredible flirt.
"Must I keep the secret?" she asked, leaning forward ever-soslightly.
"Definitely not."
She gave him a sunny smile. "Then yes, please."
Mr. Bridgerton leaned in, just about as far as she had done. "He
has been known to catapult peas across the supper table."
Honoria gave him a very somber nod. "Has he done this
recently?"
"Not too recently, no."
She pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. It was lovely
to witness this type of sibling teasing. There used to be so much of it
in her home, although most of the time she'd been but a witness.
She was so much younger than the rest of her siblings; in all
honesty, most of the time they'd probably just forgotten to tease
her.
"I have but one question, Mr. Bridgerton."
He cocked his head.
"How was this catapult constructed?"
He grinned. "Simple spoon, Lady Honoria. But in Gregory's
devious hands, there was ~ Julia Quinn

I think part of making any decision in your twenties is realizing there is no twenty-four flavor table. It's a myth. ~ Meg Jay

Another thing Tim was fond of saying was when a house falls down, the first termite to bite into it is just as much to blame as the last. Joe didn't get that one--the first termite would be long fucking dead by the time the last termite got his teeth into the wood. Wouldn't he? Every time Tim made the analogy, Joe resolved to look into termite life expectancy, but then he'd forget to do it until the next time Tim brought it up, usually when he was drunk and there was a lull in the conversation, and everyone at the table would get the same look on their faces: What is it with Tim and the fucking termites already? ~ Dennis Lehane

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Light - both physical and moral - was a central concern to the men and women living in the medieval age. They attempted to explore its properties in the colors of a stained glass canopy, in the tenor of a brisk saltarello, in the lilt of a Jongleur's ballad, in the sweet savor of a banqueting table, in the rhapsody of a well planned garden, indeed, in every arena and discipline of life. ~ Douglas Wilson Douglas Jones

No person can escape the germs of their eventual deterioration and destruction. A round-table of physical breakdown and death awaits the rich person and the poor person, as well as the common people and world leaders. The skulls of noble men and savages alike litter the streets of ancient cities. Modern humans live longer than the ancient people did, but eventually we all succumb to the same wretched infirmities. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

An alpha man is confident, fully centered in his masculine core, sure of his self worth and what he brings to the table in dating and relationships. He doesn't seek the approval of others and is repulsed by women who don't recognize his value, no matter how attractive the woman might be. An alpha man knows that he fully deserves a partner who mutually chooses him and makes a mutual effort to be together. If a man doesn't recognize himself to be valuable, then women will not see him as valuable either. What you feel, you attract." (Coach Ricioppo Parra) ~ Alessio David Ricioppo Parra

The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home. ~ Sarah Dessen

Jean-Yves looked up at his mother's face, her greying chignon, her harsh features: it was difficult to feel a rush of tenderness, of affection for this woman; as far back as he could remember, she had never really been one for hugs; it was equally difficult to imagine her in the role of a sensual lover, a slut. He suddenly realised that his father must have been bored shitless his whole life. He felt terribly shocked by this, his hands tensed on the edge of the table: this time it was irreparable, it was definitive. In despair, he tried to recall a moment when he had seen his father beaming, happy, genuinely glad to be alive. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Perishable, It Said
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
And below, in different ink,
The date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking;
Now at the back of each hand,
Now inside the knees,
Now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
Then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
Hunger, sorrow, fears-
These too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.
How suddenly then
The strange happiness took me,
Like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
Inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Those two are the horniest people I have ever met in my life. I wouldn't put it past Caleb to throw her down on the table in front of us all. Just knowing that his hand is within a twelve-inch radius of Emma's pants makes me question his motives. ~ Aly Martinez

The first thing we do is sit around a table and discuss what we could pick up from daily life, from space. That's how it starts, completely abstract. There's no kind of, "Oh, let's do Peru," or "Let's do pleats," you know? ~ Rei Kawakubo

And at half past nine in the evening at that restaurant table in Portugal," Mary continued, "someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mystery and joy. I thought, Will anyone be better off if I go straight back to the hotel and say my prayers and confess to the priest and promise never to fall into temptation again? Will anyone be the better for making me miserable?

"And the answer came back - no. No one will. There's no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn't know whether God had died, or whether there never had been a God at all. Either way I felt free and lonely and I didn't know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I'd even swallowed it. A taste - a memory - a landslide... ~ Philip Pullman

I'm slowly learning how to straddle the tension that comes with understanding I am tough and tender, brave and afraid, strong and struggling - all of these things, all of the time. I'm working on letting go of having to be one or the other and embracing the wholeness of wholeheartedness. The roles in my life - partner, mother, teacher, researcher, leader, entrepreneur - all require me to bring my whole self to the table. We can't be "all in" if only parts of us show up. If we're not living, loving, parenting, or leading with our whole, integrated hearts, we're doing it halfheartedly. ~ Brene Brown

There is one hour in his life when we see a flash of utter physical action on Christ's part, an hour when this most curious of men must have experienced the sheer joyous exuberance of a young mammal in full flight: when he lets himself go and flings over the first money changer's table in the Temple at Jerusalem, coins flying, doves thrashing into the air, oxen bellowing, sheep yowling, the money changer going head-over-teakettle, all heads turning, what the...? You don't think Christ got a shot of utter childlike physical glee at that moment? Too late to stop now, his rage rushing to his head, his veiny carpenter's-son wiry arms and hard feet milling as he whizzes through the Temple overturning tables, smashing birdcages, probably popping a furious money-changer here and there with a quick left jab or a well-placed Divine Right Elbow to the money-lending teeth, whipping his scourge of cords against the billboard-size flank of an ox, men scrambling to get out of the way, to grab some of the flying coins, to get a punch in on this nutty rube causing all the ruckus...

In all this holy rage and chaos, don't you think there was a little absolute boyish mindless physical jittery joy in the guy? ~ Brian Doyle

I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping, and the group of people who are mostly - though not exclusively - who are keeping life going in the midst of war, are not included in the negotiating table. ~ Zainab Salbi

What's the most important thing in life?" Coleen asked.
"Pie," Charlie said with a grunt. "Pass it, Momma."
Coleen was undeterred and stares at Lena, awaiting an answer.
"Love? Respect?"
Coleen stabbed the table with her finger. "Family. Most of the time, you don't love or respect them, but they're important. ~ Robin Alexander

One should hallow all that one does in one's natural life. One eats in holiness, tastes the taste of food in holiness, and the table becomes an altar. One works in holiness, and raises up the sparks which hide themselves in all tools. One walks in holiness across the fields, and the soft songs of all herbs, which they voice to God, enter into the song of our soul. ~ Martin Buber

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have. ~ David McCullough

The life of an actor lends itself to emotion, and yet you have to be tough as old boots to stay at the table. ~ Pierce Brosnan

Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. ~ Janine Benyus

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children
Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together ~ Alfred North Whitehead

The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order. We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms. When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things. In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: 'that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.' If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion. But cooking doesn't only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into a savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this! Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter--this quantity of sacrificed life--just before the body takes its first destructive bite. ~ Michael Pollan

Making a record is a lot like surgery without an anesthetic. You first have to cut yourself up the middle. Then you have to rip out every single organ, every single part and lay them on a table. You then need to examine the parts, and the reality of the situation hits you. You find yourself saying things like "I didn't know that part was so ugly." Or "I better get a professional opinion about that." You go to bed hollow and then back into the operating room the next day ... facing every fear, every disgusting thing you hate about yourself. Then you pop it all back in, sew yourself shut and perform ... you perform like your life depended on it
and in those perfect moments you find beauty you never knew existed. You find yourself and you friends all over again, you find something to fight for, something to love. Something to show the world. ~ Gerard Way

It's only second period, and the whole school knows Emma broke up with him. So far, he's collected eight phone numbers, one kiss on the cheek, and one pinch to the back of his jeans. His attempts to talk to Emma between classes are thwarted by a hurricane of teenage females whose main goal seems to be keeping him and his ex-girlfriend separated.
When the third period bell rings, Emma has already chosen a seat where she'll be barricaded from him by other students. Throughout class, she pays attention as if the teacher were giving instructions on how to survive a life-threatening catastrophe in the next twenty-four hours. About midway through class, he receives a text from a number he doesn't recognize.
If you let me, I can do things to u to make u forget her.
As soon as he clears it, another one pops up from a different number.
Hit me back if u want to chat. I'll treat u better than E.
How did they get my number? Tucking his phone back into his pocket, he hovers over his notebook protectively, as if it's the only thing left that hasn't been invaded. Then he notices the foreign handwriting scribbled on it by a girl named Shena who encircled her name and phone number with a heart. Not throwing it across the room takes almost as much effort as not kissing Emma.
At lunch, Emma once again blocks his access to her by sitting between people at a full picnic table outside. He chooses the table directly across from her, but she seems oblivious, absently so ~ Anna Banks

We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My enter life I knew, and many others knew, that our daily bread was itself a kind of scripture of our origins, a taste track of our lives. It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning, and humans for the most part despise meaningless food. In America, and especially the American South, 'race' endures alongside the sociopolitics of food; it is not a stretch to say that that race is both on and at the Southern table. But if it is on the table alone we have learned nothing; we continue to reduce each other to stereotypical essences.

It is not enough to be white at the table. It is not enough to be black at the table. It is not enough to be 'just human' at the table. Complexity must come with us - in fact it will invite itself to the feast whether we like it or not. We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere. I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much truth as time will allow. ~ Michael W. Twitty

An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Cool of night
Warmth of my life ~ Jacques Prevert

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the "hat trick" with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetr ~ Phillip Gibbs

As the Almighty God, Jesus is high, but when He came to us as food He was lowly. He was a loaf of bread. He was even the crumbs under the table (Matt. 15:21-27). The very Jesus who came to us as life in the form of food was not tall and great; He was small and lowly. ~ Witness Lee

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea. ~ Daniel Dennett

Drink deep the cup of life; take it's dark wine into your soul. For it passes round the table only once. ~ Jack McDevitt

WORK, SOMETIMES
I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.
The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.
What are we sure of? Happiness isn't a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.
Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.
You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn't it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!
As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life. ~ Mary Oliver

I have a different mentality when it comes to catering to a man, I just won't allow it. Don't get me wrong, I'll do for you but I'm not taking care of no man and catering to him for life; he better be bringing something to the table. I learned that from my mother and my grandmother. ~ Teena Marie

Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her and that for whatever reason she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table ivory elephant charm rainbow onion hairdo violence melodrama honey ... None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her but to each she would have to say I don't love you. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Why do men like me want sons?" he wondered. "It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone. ~ John Steinbeck

A similar obligatory likeness of George adorned Mrs Glover's bedside table. Trussed in uniform and uncomfortable before a studio backdrop that reminded Sylvie of the Amalfi coast, George Glover no longer resembled a Sistine Adam. Sylvie thought of all the enlisted men who had already undergone the same ritual, a keepsake for mothers and sweethearts, the only photograph that would ever be taken of some of them. 'He could be killed,' Bridget said of her beau, 'and I might forget what he looked like.' Sylvie had plenty of photographs of Hugh. He led a well-documented life. ~ Kate Atkinson

My visit to England is a memorable event in my life, from the fact of my having there received strong, religious impressions. The contemptuous manner in which the communion had been administered to colored people in my native place; the church membership of Dr. Flint and others like him; and the buying and selling of slaves, by professed ministers of the gospel, had given me a prejudice against the Episcopal church. The whole service seemed to me a mockery and a sham. But my home in Steventon was in the home of a clergyman, who was a true disciple of Jesus. The beauty of his daily life inspired me with faith in the genuineness of Christian professions. Grace entered my heart, and I knelt at the communion table, I trust, in true humility of soul. ~ Harriet Jacobs

The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving. ~ James Frey

I could set from memory a replica of the perfect Still Life she laid out on the table each morning: the carefully folded Advertiser, the two canary yellow hemispheres of grapefruit in their bowls, separated by a more richly yellowed cube of butter; the sky blue milk-jug and matching sugar bowl filled to the brim with their differently textured whitenesses; the pot of tea snug in its knitted navy blue cosy, the steam that rose invisibly from its spout suddenly rendered visible, swirling, where it entered the slanting morning light. ~ Peter Goldsworthy

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I could feel the baby being torn from my insides. It was really painful ... Three-quarters of the way through the operation I sat up ... In the cylinder I saw the bits and pieces of my little child floating in a pool of blood. I screamed and jumped up off the table ... I just couldn't stop throwing up ... ~ Randy Alcorn

I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn't matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. "Do you want my life to be meaningless?" he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, "I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?" I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I'm not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. "You see, you see!" he said. "You do believe, don't you, and you're going to place your trust in Him, aren't you?" Obviously, I again said no. He fell back in his chair. ~ Albert Camus

We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyday things: at the dinner table, in the kitchen, washing dishes, grocery-shopping, commuting. These things make up the fabric of our lives. ~ Annia Ciezadlo

I grew up with 'Life' magazine on the coffee table, Life cereal on the breakfast table, and the game of Life on the card table. People were just so happy to be alive, I guess. ~ Lorrie Moore

Of late there has been a new spirit manifested in the youth which is growing up with the depression. This spirit is more purposeful though still confused. It wants to create a new world, but is not clear as to how it wants to go about it. For that reason the young generation asks for saviors. It tends to believe in dictators and to hail each new aspirant for that honor as a messiah. It wants cut and dried systems of salvation with a wise minority to direct society on some one-way road to utopia. It has not yet realized that it must save itself. The young generation has not yet learned that the problems confronting them can be solved only by themselves and will have to be settled on the basis of social and economic freedom in co-operation with the struggling masses for the right to the table and joy of life. ~ Emma Goldman

The way you treat your food on your plate is a reflection of the way you treat people in your life. Learning how to dine teaches you not just how to eat but how to treat people. ~ Rajiv Talreja

Always remember to set a place at the table of life for the unexpected guest. ~ Linda Ellerbee

There were times I imagined being at the hot chick table at lunch (mostly cheerleaders), chatting away about the boy of my dreams and other unboring stuff. Then I couldn't help wondering if the changes in my life had steered me away from being like them. Mostly I just wanted to fit in. After all, girls at that table were snobby at times. ~ C.C. Wyatt

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more impatiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost any sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

What the hell, Kirotu? How did you drink that shit without making a puking? I'd sell my late grandmother's soul to the Devil if it takes back the last thirty seconds of my life!" Bee continues, sliding the empty glass across the table towards him.

"I'm a warrior," he shrugs, his face still blank except for the tiniest twitch on the corner of his mouth. Asshole. ~ Marian Erway

Life and I became friends some years ago - not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home every day to my apartment. I have a moment now and then - as I peel an orange and take it from kitchen counter to table - when I feel almost a pang of contentment, perhaps at that raw colour. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister. He merely struck him with the pistol and ran on and crouched behind that table and defied the black blood for the last time, as he had been defying it for thirty years. He crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand. ~ William Faulkner

Is the church really demonstrating the new life in Christ if there is no discipline, if there is no fencing in of the Lord's table, no demand for purity of life? ~ Michael Sattler

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died ... He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life ... Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Generally speaking, most of our vital, spontaneous, instinctual life gets shamed. Children are shamed for being too rambunctious, for wanting things and for laughing too loud. Much dysfunctional shame occurs at the dinner table. Children are forced to eat when they are not hungry. Sometimes children are forced to eat what they do not find appetizing. Being exiled to the dinner table until the plate is cleaned is not unusual in modern family life. The public humiliation of sitting at the dinner table all alone, often with siblings jeering, is a painful kind of exposure. ~ John Bradshaw

My therapist shared a theory she had come across, and I liked it. It held that before making your next journey in this life, your soul sits at a large, circular conference table and chooses the souls who are going to be a part of your life. As for which particular people would be chosen, I figured they would be individuals from previous lives with whom there was still unfinished business. ~ Melissa Gilbert

A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish - read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine."

"There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character. I suspect that in this comprehensive and (may I say) commonplace censure, you are not judging from yourself, but from prejudiced persons, whose opinions you have been in the habit of hearing. It is impossible that your own observation can have given you much knowledge of the clergy. You can have been personally acquainted with very few of a set of men you condemn so conclusively. You are speaking what you have been told at your uncle's table."

"I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct. Though I have not seen much of the domestic lives of clergymen, it is seen by too many to leave any deficiency of information. ~ Jane Austen