Billy Johnson

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“that eating is something more than animal indulgence, and that cooking has a nobler purpose than the gratification of appetite and the sense of taste.”
― Anonymous

“I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: “No, you’re not.” “And what do you mean by ‘No, you’re not’?” I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become sun-browned and sea-weathered. I would smell like fish. I would be a Salty Dog. “I mean,” Sylvia said, “that when the engine dies and you start drifting, which will happen, because things like that do seem to happen to you, you will not survive two days. Your skin will fry, you will collapse from dehydration, and because you will be the most useless person on the boat, you will be regarded by the others as a potential food source.” I didn’t like the imagery here.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals