Jessica B. Harris > Quotes

“If you can afford it, buy it. Always offer your friends the best that you can and have it in prodigious abundance.”
― Jessica B. Harris, My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir

“Too many of us still tend to regard Africa as a country. It may come as a brutal shock to realize that the African landmass is three times the size of Europe and four times that of the United States. Madagascar, which is a part of Africa, is the fourth-largest island in the world. Too many folk still talk about people speaking African, ignoring the fact that over 1,000 different languages are spoken on this continent that comprises many worlds...It is a continent with many doors, many different points of entry into a world that is wondrous and strange.”
― Jessica B. Harris, The Africa Cookbook

“You cannot step twice in the same river--Heraclitus”
― Jessica B. Harris, My Soul Looks Back

“New York is an organic city, one that is always in transition. Within a lifetime (often in only a few decades) neighborhoods grow, gain prominence, peak, and return to oblivion.”
― Jessica B. Harris, My Soul Looks Back

“Soul food, it would seem, depends on an ineffable quality. It is a combination of nostalgia for and pride in the food of those who came before. In the manner of the Negro spiritual “How I Got Over,” soul food looks back at the past and celebrates a genuine taste palate while offering more than a nod to the history of disen-franchisement of blacks in the United States.”
― Jessica B. Harris, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

“Archaeologists now feel certain that eastern and southern Africa provide the world's earliest and most continuous record of human evolution. If so, then this history includes what is arguably some of humankind's earliest food production.”
― Jessica B. Harris, The Africa Cookbook