This past summer, while having dinner with a friend and her parents, we started talking about the dishes that we would always ask our mothers to make when we were home visiting. For my friend, the answer came quite easily: spaghetti and meatballs. When it was my turn, however, I had to stop and think.…
Change, or maybe luck, has a funny way of creeping up on you. Maybe you have to feel completely hopeless before it will swoop in to save you, or maybe all it really takes is making other plans before something unexpected magically works out. Whatever it is, it feels like the perversity of the universe…
Riuscire meglio a pane che a farina. [To succeed more with the bread than with the flour, i.e. to have more success than expected.]You could say that this Italian proverb, which I found at the beginning of Carol Field's The Italian Baker (sadly, I speak no Italian), has been the overarching theme of the week.…
Fate has a thousand wiles when it chooses to impose on us its incomprehensible whims. A temporary blackout, a moment of inattention or blindness is enough to insinuate an act between the Scylla and Charybdis of decision. Afterward, with hindsight, we may endlessly ponder that act, explain our motives, try to discover our true intentions; but the act remains irrevocable.-Bruno…
It is true, I have looked at you all this evening. Your beauty troubled me. Your beauty has grievously troubled me, and I have looked at you too much. But I will look at you no more. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do…
Dining with Dostoevsky 