Горький – всегда чуточку неожиданный. Кофе, шоколад, розмарин, лимонная цедра, вино. Когда-то, когда мы были варварами, горечь предостерегала об отраве. Вкусовые рецепторы все еще сопротивляются при встрече с ней. Мы их убеждаем: «Приспосабливайтесь», а еще «Наслаждайтесь».
Шампанское и молчание – единственное убежище на свете.
Невозможно забыть сказки, которые мы себе рассказываем, даже если их должна была вытеснить правда.
Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.
BITTER: always a bit unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, citrus rinds, wine. Once, when we were wild, it told us about poison. The mouth still hesitates at each new encounter. We urge it forward, say, Adapt. Now, enjoy it.
A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.
“Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”
Salting the most nuanced of enterprises, the food always requesting more, but the tipping point fatal.
Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We’ve tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood.
I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit—the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.
“Tasting is a farce,” she said with her eyes closed, nose deep in the bowl of the glass. “The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That’s the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”
Вы все до ужаса боитесь молодых. Мы напоминаем вам о том, каково это иметь идеалы, веру, свободу. Мы напоминаем вам обо всем, что вы потеряли, став взрослыми, циничными, отупелыми, пресыщенными, разбавив компромиссами жизнь, о которой мечтали. А я? Мне пока незачем идти на компромисс. Я не обязана делать решительно ничего, чего не хотела бы. Вот почему ты меня ненавидишь.