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“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

“Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.”
― Craig Claiborne

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“After a full belly all is poetry.”
― Frank McCourt

“When engaged in eating, the brain should be the servant of the stomach.”
― Agatha Christie

“Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Health food makes me sick.”
― Calvin Trillin

“She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:

1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...)

2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...)

3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts.

4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...)

5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...)

6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...)

7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...)

8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano.

And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.

[From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]”
― Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters

“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me”
― Emily Dickinson

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“Because thou writest me often, I thank thee ... Never do I receive a letter from thee, but immediately we are together.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Continue for the present to write to me by every opportunity: I may receive your letters on some occasions when I need them most to support my spirits.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer’s personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.”
― Emily Post

“Letter writing is a habit that allows us to explore new trails all our lives. Each day is a fresh new adventure when we regularly send and receive letters.”
― Alexandra Stoddard, Gift of a Letter: Giving the Gift of Ourselves-- Add Richness and Grace to Your Life Through the Art of Letter-writing

“For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
― Horace Mann

“My favorite animal is steak.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“It stood calm against the suburban storm raging around it. The thunder screamed across the sky; it slapped the clouds into a heated turmoil that flew towards the south.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness