Quotes from Rebecca Rupp

What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today's you isn't the same as yesterday's you and won't be the same as tomorrow's you. But Walter also thinks that there's a real perfect you that you're always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it.

J. B. Morton, who wrote: "Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes and laugh in a cold, calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, and favor beards.")

Keep all your promises, don't take what doesn't belong to you, and always look after those less fortunate than yourself, and you'll do well in the world.

A real friend is someone who likes you for who you want to be and not for who they want you to be.

Sometimes you have to destroy the past so that you'll learn how to live in the new world.

In the words of the Joni Mitchell song, we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Real food, Pollan points out, is not fast. Like all good things, it takes time: one way or another, it grows, and the closer we are to that process, the healthier and happier we're likely to be.

if Eve had had a spade and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple.

American bean cookery owes a lot to the Indians who, by the time the European colonists arrived, had been cooking and eating beans for at least 600 years.

Since Roman times, farmers have periodically planted their fields with Rhizobia-toting legumes to add fixed nitrogen to the soil.

L-dopa may account for the classical reports of sleep disturbances, vivid dreaming, and enhanced sexuality associated with fava bean eating.

a kid snatched from the jaws of a savage wolf," which sounds suspiciously like the first-century equivalent of roadkill.

The thing about death is that it takes a while before you realize that it's never going to go away.

It seems to me if we all just did what we're good at, the planet would average out to okay.

the medieval Doctrine of Signatures held that the shapes of plants constituted a broad hint from the Almighty as to their uses in healing.

Despite — or perhaps because of — its propensity for provoking unbridled lust, people have been cooking asparagus at least since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Pliny reports solemnly, "It is said that if a person is rubbed with asparagus beaten up in oil, he will never be stung by bees.

According to Norse legend, peas arrived on earth as a punishment sent by the god Thor who, in a fit of pique, dispatched a flight of dragons with peas in their talons to fill up the wells of his unsatisfactory worshippers.

In the early 1990s, the American government, in an attempt to persuade Peruvian farmers to grow something other than coca — the immensely profitable raw material of cocaine — began to subsidize Peruvian asparagus.

Tepary beans, before the advent of the playing card and the poker chip, figured as counters in an ancient Indian gambling game.

Both Old and New World beans — and, to be fair, bran, onions, cucumbers, raisins, cauliflower, lettuce, coffee, and dark beer — have a reputation for eliciting a condition known delicately in the sixteenth century as "windinesse." Flatulence, for much of human history, has been a pressing social concern:

If you lived on cabbage, you would not be obliged to flatter the powerful." The young man promptly replied, "If you flattered the powerful, you would not be obliged to live on cabbage.

Emperor Claudius, the story goes, once convoked the Senate to vote on whether corned beef and cabbage was the best of all possible dinner dishes.

Not worth beans" has meant "utterly valueless" since the thirteenth century, which shows that, historically, we haven't had a clue as to the value of beans.