59 Quotes by Michael Paterniti

By living so long, the supercentenarian earns the prefixal 'super' and becomes a person suddenly freighted with power and meaning. He's Gandalf, Yoda, the Ancient Mariner, perhaps with some otherworldly insight. He's lived so long that, in fact, he's living the afterlife to his own initial life.

Luck is not having to worry, but also working hard to preserve the things that once gave your life meaning, like work and love.

What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.

I wish we could all have a telling room, a place where we go to tell our stories and listen to the stories of others; in our culture, the telling room might be around the dinner table or in the car on a long trip.

When somebody tells you a story, as long as that story lasts, you're caught in this sort of timeless moment.

The telling room is, in Spanish, known as 'el contador.'

People have become so much more obsessed with the stories behind their food. When we go the market to buy bacon, we want to know where that pig came from and what processes were involved in getting it to us.

Writers like John T. Edge, whose work is all about the cultural histories behind food, have done so much to show that these stories are a really vital part of our cultural heritage.

I've been told there's a special golden shelf, in the secret vault kept at the back of every bookstore in America, that contains the Bible, 'War and Peace,' and 'Driving Mr. Albert.'