Quotes from Michael Paterniti

Laughing brings out the good in food. It's good to laugh. If you don't laugh, you're going to magnify. And if you magnify, you're going to die.

Grief is schizophrenic. You find yourself of two minds, the one that governs your days up until the moment of grief—the one that opens easily to memories of the girl at six, twelve, eighteen—and the one that seeks to destroy everything afterward.

He'd taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity.

This again was the curious thing about Ambrosio, his willingness to live fully inside the moment, whatever its virtue or folly, without regard for the future.

Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope.

He claimed he got his hairstyle... 'through negligence.' Explaining his overall sloppiness, he said, 'It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.

Chicago rising out of the Midwest like huge metallic cornstalks...

After all, I couldn't name my longing, and yet it was there, always driving me away from the place I stood.

No one in my family questions my desire, however inchoate or ineffable, because it's partly their desire too: this need to be self-sufficient and free at all costs.

Talk of you or me,' he told her, 'but never of 'us.

Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident...

For these moments in transit, when you ride in the bubble of your own thoughts, without intrusion, moving at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour, everything becomes color and speed and, for a moment, you outrace your own woes.

Once beyond Philadelphia, the state opens into hills and mountains and broad, flat valleys.

Despite the fact that he was a sixty-one year old man when he was naturalized as an American citizen, it's amazing how fully he's been appropriated by this country.