Quotes about dinner
page 4

“We now come to a third evil, namely, our very unsatisfactory, not to say ugly, furniture. It may be objected that it does not much matter what may be the exact curve of the legs of the chair a man sits upon, or of the table off which he eats his dinner, provided the said articles of furniture answer their respective uses; but, unfortunately, what we see continually before our eyes is likely, indeed is quite sure, to exercise a very great influence upon our taste, and therefore the question of beautiful versus ugly furniture does become a matter of very great importance. I might easily enlarge upon the enormities, inconveniences, and extravagances of our modern upholsterers, but that has been so fully done in a recent number of the "Cornhill Magazine" that I may well dispense with the task.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Eastop & Gil commented that: Burges held strong views about furniture, and protested at the "enormities, inconveniences, and upholsterers." (1865: 69) He advocated the use of the medieval style, because "not only did its duty as furniture, but spoke and told a story" (1865: 71). Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 69: Partly cited in: Dinah Eastop, ‎Kathryn Gill (2012) Upholstery Conservation: Principles and Practice. http://books.google.com/books?id=2gf50OiP8lAC&pg=PA50 p. 47.

Beauty, Exercises, Question, Evil

“Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), Ch. 2: Scrubbing in Maine (pp. 117-118)

World, Religion, Food, Feeling

“It is a remarkable thing with reference to men who are distressed for money… they never seem at a loss for small sums, or deny themselves those luxuries which small sums purchase. Cabs, dinners, wine, theatres, and new gloves are always at the command of men who are drowned in pecuniary embarrassments, whereas those who don't owe a shilling are so frequently obliged to go without them!”

Anthony Trollope Framley Parsonage

Framley Parsonage (1861)

Men, Money, Wine, Loss

“It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

In Love with Daylight (1995)

Way, Time

“Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Lovel the Widower (1860), Ch. 6.

Despair

“We have created a false dichotomy between behaviors attributable to companion animals and those of other species that blinds us to the inherent worth and needs of all animals.
The problem is that we have constructed a society in which we are rarely forced to think about where what we consume comes from, and this extends to the animals reared for our consumption. While we pamper one set of animals, another set of animals becomes our food. The main difference is that we come to know one set of these animals, while the other set is raised and killed for us, delivered in plastic wrap and Styrofoam, and served up as dinner. If nothing else, this belies the deep moral confusion that we have about animals as a culture.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 2

Food, Behavior, Problem, Thinking

“My veganism stems from Mike Vallely. He was the person, he and Christian Kline … would take me out to dinner and say, “We’ll buy dinner for you if you don’t order meat.” I remember being totally bummed out about that and thinking, “I can’t get the Kung Pow chicken, this sucks.” Then I read some pamphlets and discovered how it was made. I think it takes a weird person to know that and then keep eating it. As I read that stuff, it hit me and I instantly went vegetarian. Then a year later went vegan. I read more information because I was interested, the floodgates opened and there was no turning back. … A lot of kids come up to me at demos and say, “Oh, you’ve skated so long. Is that because you’re vegan?” I’m always the first person on the course and the last person off. I’ve always had good energy. Maybe it’s from eating healthy. … I was just one person who said, “I’m not putting my dollars into this stuff, I’m only putting my dollars in this vegan stuff.” When millions of others do the same, the markets respond. Now there’s great ice cream and great soy milk. Everything you can dream about is made vegan now. That’s something that has transformed over the years. I did my little part, my little sacrifice made a point.”

Ed Templeton (1972) artist

"Ed Templeton Interview pt. 2" https://web.archive.org/web/20130207234012/http://veganskateblog.com/interview/ed-templeton-interview-pt-2. Vegan Skate Blog (February 1, 2013).

Dreams, Thinking, Reading, Parting

“The dinner was the best style of women's-magazine art, whereby the salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible fried chicken resembled something else.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 8

Women, Art

“I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art.… (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Art, Painting, Personality, Dead

“We went somewhere very nice for dinner — it was very good but I can't tell you exactly what we did. It would be too naughty and you can’t run it anyway. It would just be bloop bleep bloop bloop bleep. But it was a very good first date.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

On her first date with Seal, quoted by Hollie McKay in "Heidi Klum's 'Naughty' First Date With Seal" http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352078,00.html

“The Chinese foreign minister Yang Jia Chi was in Bangalore Tuesday for a bilateral meeting. We are both quite satisfied with the extent of goodwill between us. We are working toward further cordiality between the two countries. The Chinese minister lingered at the dinner in his honor and such gestures indicate the level of relationship between our two countries.”

S. M. Krishna (1932) Indian politician

Regarding the border issues of China and India, October 29, 2009. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/091028/sm-krishna-india-foreign-minister-kashmir

Country

“The country does want rest, we all want rest. Our very civilization wants it — and we mean that it shall have it. It shall have rest — repose — refreshment of soul and re-invigoration of faculty. And that rest shall be of life and not of death. It shall not be a poison that pacifies restlessness in death, nor shall it be any kind of anodyne or patting or propping or bolstering — as if a man with a cancer in his breast would be well if he only said he was so and wore a clean shirt and kept his shoes tied. We want the rest of a real Union, not of a name, not of a great transparent sham, which good old gentlemen must coddle and pat and dandle, and declare wheedlingly is the dearest Union that ever was, SO it is; and naughty, ugly old fanatics shan't frighten the pretty precious — no, they sha'n't. Are we babies or men? This is not the Union our fathers framed — and when slavery says that it will tolerate a Union on condition that freedom holds its tongue and consents that the Constitution means first slavery at all costs and then liberty, if you can get it, it speaks plainly and manfully, and says what it means. There are not wanting men enough to fall on their knees and cry: 'Certainly, certainly, stay on those terms. Don't go out of the Union — please don't go out; we'll promise to take great care in future that you have everything you want. Hold our tongues? Certainly. These people who talk about liberty are only a few fanatics — they are tolerably educated, but most of 'em are crazy; we don't speak to them in the street; we don't ask them to dinner; really, they are of no account, and if you'll really consent to stay in the Union, we'll see if we can't turn Plymouth Rock into a lump of dough'. I don't believe the Southern gentlemen want to be fed on dough. I believe they see quite as clearly as we do that this is not the sentiment of the North, because they can read the election returns as well as we. The thoughtful men among them see and feel that there is a hearty abhorrence of slavery among us, and a hearty desire to prevent its increase and expansion, and a constantly deepening conviction that the two systems of society are incompatible. When they want to know the sentiment of the North, they do not open their ears to speeches, they open their eyes, and go and look in the ballot-box, and they see there a constantly growing resolution that the Union of the United States shall no longer be a pretty name for the extension of slavery and the subversion of the Constitution. Both parties stand front to front. Each claims that the other is aggressive, that its rights have been outraged, and that the Constitution is on its side. Who shall decide? Shall it be the Supreme Court? But that is only a co-ordinate branch of the government. Its right to decide is not mutually acknowledged. There is no universally recognized official expounder of the meaning of the Constitution. Such an instrument, written or unwritten, always means in a crisis what the people choose. The people of the United States will always interpret the Constitution for themselves, because that is the nature of popular governments, and because they have learned that judges are sometimes appointed to do partisan service.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Life, Death, Men, People

“Her talking about the Obama Administration has done a great job and deserves an A on the economy. I mean, please, let's talk to American families and sit around the dinner table at night figuring how to pay their bills. The American economy is not in good shape; productivity is failing.”

Paul Manafort (1949) American political consultant

Interview on NBC News' Meet The Press (July 31, 2016)

Family, Night

“But Adrian did not hear him. I have mentioned that during dinner, preoccupied with his thoughts, he had bolted his food. Nature now took its toll. An acute spasm suddenly ran though him, and with a brief 'Ouch!' of pain he doubled up and began to walk round in circles. Sir Jasper clicked his tongue impatiently. "This is no time for doing the Astaire pom-pom dance," he said sharply.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

From P.G. Wodehouse's Mulliner Nights (1933).

Pain, Food, Nature, Time

“Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Coffee, Nostalgia

“Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Hope, Way, Forgetting

“I am not anti-coloured, take it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a seaport, and I see a coloured family there — the black father, the black wife and the black children… When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy, and when I see them leaving at London airport I am happy.
But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this — the way… the thing is when I am down in Torquay and I switch on my television and I see one of them reading our news to us. It is our news and they’re reading it to me. If I was a chauvinist I would say I object even to seeing women reading our news to us.
But now we have women reading our news to us. If they could perhaps have their own news which they were reading to us, I suppose [laughter], it would be very interesting.
For the time being, for a transitional period I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, following by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts…”

David Irving (1938) British writer and Holocaust denier

David Irving's Talk to the Clarendon Club http://www.fpp.co.uk/speeches/speech190992.html

Women, Happiness, Children, Family

“I am a trial lawyer…. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

New York Times (10 November 1986)

“Nobody doubts that the Russians committed aggression, that Saddam Hussein committed aggression. We attribute to them rational goals, maybe they wanted to control the energy of the Middle East or something. With regard to ourselves, it's impossible… We just cannot adopt towards ourselves the same sane attitudes that we adopt easily, in fact reflexively, when others commit crimes… And if anyone says it, educated people, liberal intellectuals, are infuriated. Because it suggests that we could do something that's not noble. We can make mistakes, that's easy. You can criticize mistakes. You can criticize low-level crimes, like Abu-Ghraib, you can criticize that. You can criticize My Lai. But not the educated, civilized people, the kind of people we have dinner with, see at concerts, sitting in air-conditioned offices planning mass-murder. So that's beyond criticism. On the other hand, if it's half-crazed G. I. s in the field, uneducated, don't know who's going to shoot at them next, you can blame them, you can say how awful they are. You can criticize Lynndie England, disadvantaged young woman, very different from us. But how about the guys who organized and planned it? No.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2006, Discussion with Robert Trivers, 2006

People, Education, Guy

“How would our society women like to spend the morning in a slaughter-house, before they could procure their meat for the evening dinner?”

Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) Jersey parapsychologist

Source: The Natural Food for Man, p. 161

Women, Housing

“I’m going to take you out tonight,” he said. “Another Heisenberg dinner.”
“What’s that?”
“Uncertainty,” Edward said crisply. “We know where we are going, but not what we are going to eat. Or vice versa.”
“Sounds wonderful. Which car?”
“The Quantum, of course.”
“Oh, Lord. We just had the speedometer fixed.”
“And the steering went out?”

Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction

“Shh! It’s still working. We’re cheating.”
Source: Blood Music (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 65)

Cars, Cheating

“I think it’s more difficult to be vegan than gay. I think people have a harder time accepting it; people feel more uncomfortable with a vegan at their dinner table than they do a lesbian. It’s confronting. It’s kind of suggesting that what someone else is doing is bad or wrong, and it hits them on a more personal level. … If somebody is setting there eating a steak watching you eat polenta, they’re thinking that you’re trying to preach to them or you’re trying to convert them in some way. Whereas with being gay, I don’t think anyone’s concerned that that’s the agenda. “Hey, Mom, you also have to be gay. I’m gay and so should you be!””

Portia de Rossi (1973) Australian-American actress

Certainly when I told her that I was vegan, it forced her to look at her habits. Interview for VegNews magazine, July/August 2011 issue. Quoted in VegetarianStar.com http://vegetarianstar.com/2011/07/07/portia-de-rossi-on-vegnews-julyaugust-2011-issue/.

People, Way, Feeling, Moms

“I tell you, I'd be lucky to hit.280 in New York. There are too many people in New York, and if you don't want to be a bad guy, you must go to all the dinners and meetings. How could I concentrate on baseball? I have so many good friends in New York that it is hard to turn them down. But it is that way every place on the road. I tell the hotel that I will not be disturb, [sic] but people find me anyway.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking after the 1972 NLCS, as quoted in "Puerto Rico Has Lost a Hero"
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

People, Way, Guy

“Jordan Elliot: What's for dinner?
Lois Lane: Pizza. After that, if Jonathan's quiet, I thought maybe bed with a bottle of wine. And after that, I figure we just live happily ever after. Sound good to you?
Jordan: Lois, my love… [turns and winks to the reader as he closes the door] What do you think?”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (1986)

Love, Thinking, Wine

“Like nothing else, the annual Correspondents' Dinner is a mark of a corrupt politics. It's a sickening specter, where some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome's provinces.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Thanks, POTUS, For Breaking-Up The Annual Correspondents’ Circle Jerk." http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/05/thanks_potus_for_breakingup_the_annual_correspondents_circle_jerk.html The American Thinker, May 8, 2017. 2010s, 2017

People, Country

“I endeavor to take things as they come with cheerfulness, and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Letter to William Irving, Jr., about his positive attitude acquired while traveling in Europe.
Source: Washington Irving to William Irving Jr., September 20, 1804, Works 23:90.

“I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life—many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Source: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), p. 27

Life, Men, Money, Happiness

“I'm no good at dinner parties. I feel very uneasy at them.”

Dermot Healy (1947–2014) Irish writer

Small talk: Dermot Healy, 2011

Feeling

“So then Mom decided my father ought to do a vegan diet, too. Well, my father grew up on a cattle ranch, but the nice thing is, my dad’s been sitting at the same dinner table for fifty-one years, and he can’t find his way around the kitchen! He’s been relying my Mom for fifty-one years to put the plate in front of him. So Mom went to the local health food store and bought hot dogs that are called “Not Dogs” and veggie burgers – which used to taste like cardboard, but now they’re really good. She can get Canadian bacon made of a wheat derivative. It’s all vegetarian. Instead of cow’s milk, it’s soy milk, rice milk, fake eggs – all that stuff! Dad just keeps cleaning his plate. Now I’ve got two vegetarian parents, and only one of them know it!”

Neal D. Barnard (1953) American physician, author, and clinical researcher

Wramc Us Too, Inc Newsletter (2003).

Health, Food, Dogs, Way

“School was strange, rather amusing - with a teacher standing at the front telling you what to write. The camaraderie was interesting. I tend to remember the things you can't recreate on your own - queuing up for your dinner, learning team games, which were a complete mystery to me. I remember having to pretend I knew how to play hockey, that kind of thing.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Mail on Sunday - 06/02/2000
Childhood

School, Game, Learning, Teachers

“Alas I shall very probably not be able to dine with you [madame Charpentier who frequently had receptions in Paris which Renoir frequently visited]. I began a portrait this morning; I begin another this evening, and it is extremely likely that I shall have a third to do afterwards. If I have to stay for dinner, and begin tomorrow, all these people will go away, and my head is in a complete muddle with them.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

in a letter to madame Charpentier, c. 1876; as quoted in Renoir – his life and work, Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates / Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 80
1870's

People

“Jesus' message is about love and compassion, but there is nothing loving or compassionate at factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals endure miserable lives and die violent deaths. Jesus mandates kindness and mercy for all God's creatures. He'd be appalled by the suffering that we inflict on animals today to indulge our acquired taste for their flesh. Catholics, and all Christians, have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the violence, misery and death in the world, or we can respect God's creatures with a vegetarian diet. I believe we're obligated to make choices that are as merciful as possible, and we can all do that at the dinner table with a vegetarian diet. There won't be any factory farms and slaughterhouses in heaven.”

Bruce Friedrich (1969) Member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

"Is Eating Meat A Catholic Sin?", interview by Hank Pellissier, in SFGate.com (2 February 2004) http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Is-Eating-Meat-A-Catholic-Sin-2802645.php

Love, Death, God, World

“You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Letter to Frances Turnbull (9 November 1938), in A Life in Letters (1994), p. 368
Quoted, Letters

People, Learning, Time, Heart

“Engage the people. Don't try to pass a 2,700 page bill — and even they didn't read it! You and I didn't have time to read it. We're too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That's why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You'll have time to read that one over the dinner table. What does Herman Cain, President Cain talking about in this particular bill?”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

at Family Leader Presidential Lecture Series in Pella, Iowa, 2011-10-06, quoted in [Exclusive: Herman Cain Pledges Not To Sign Any Bill Longer Than Three Pages, 2011-06-07, Marie, Diamond, Think Progress, http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/07/238779/herman-cain-long-bills/, 2011-10-07]

People, School, Business, Time

“We had finished dinner. We're now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2017, April

Beauty

“I performed at a show at the MoMA. There was this big dinner there, and I was seated in this hall with the mayor of New York and all these extremely wealthy art-supporting and art-buying people. There was a piece of work hanging in the hall-it was a fan. This fan was supposed to swing by the momentum of its own propeller. So, while we were having dinner, the fan was stopped, and the guy next to me, a curator at P. S.1, said, "Look, this is what art symbolizes today." Like, that piece of art is supposed to be moving, but just to have dinner we've stopped the art. That's what New York is like today. You can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/kehinde-wiley/#page2 with Kehinde Wiley on the "recycled object" for Interview magazine (2008) Sourced quotes

People, World, Art, Guy

“Once after a dinner party, Gregory Peck and I drove Fred Astaire home. Fred lived in a colonial house that had a long porch with many pillars. When we dropped him off, he danced along the whole front porch, then opened the door, tipped his hat to us, and disappeared. Wow! Greg and I couldn't speak for a few minutes. It was a beautiful way to say thank you.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Kirk Douglas in Douglas, Kirk. Let's Face It. Wiley, 2007. ISBN 9780470084694, p. 26.

Beauty, Way, Home, Dance

“There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving…. I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted…. For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son…. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Love, Home, Idea, Strong

“I was threatened to be ducked in the pond if I proceeded, and of course we had a great deal of the survey to take by stealth at the time when the persons were at dinner; we would not get it by night, for we were watched day and night and guns were discharged over the ground belonging to Captain Bradshaw to prevent us. I can state further, I was twice turned off the ground myself by his men; and they said if I did not go instantly they would carry me off to Worsley.”

George Stephenson (1781–1848) English civil engineer and mechanical engineer

Statement during Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill Parliamentary Hearings (1825-04-25)

Men, Time, Personality, Night

“The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa - was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century additions. Heavy coloured glass ashtrays of monstrous size and weight rested in inlaid marquetry tables of vaguely Pompadour associations. At dinner we drank champagne from ruby Bohemian glasses: the meat was carved at a Boulle-type sideboard. ‘Regency’ wallpaper of dark green and lighter green stripes was partially covered by gilt-framed landscapes of no style whatsoever.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

A Friend From England (1987)

Housing

“This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1763
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

“In an effort to salvage the money I wasted on this bullshit, I ate six cups of jello, one bag of corn nuts, a Soynut bar, and a bag of jelly beans for dinner. The only thing X-TREME about this experience was the X-TREME dump I took later that night:”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

Take your X-TREME marketing and shove it. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=xtreme_bullshit The Best Page in the Universe

Money, Effort, Night

“The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out: a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We want to get it done and out to the people who will use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully embodies its maker's conception of what it could have been. Human frailty, your own and that of others, makes flaws and mistakes inevitable.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 122.

People, Books, Appearance, Reading

“He makes his cook his merit,
And the world visits his dinners and not him.”

Molière The Misanthrope

Que de son cuisinier il s'est fait un mérite,
Et que c'est à sa table à qui l'on rend visite.
Act II, sc. iv
Le Misanthrope (1666)

World, Cooking

“In the years when he'd worked full-time, he'd never complained about frozen or takeout or preprepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing - that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren't valued the way they were when he was young.”

Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections

The Corrections (2001)

Life, Family, Way, Nature

“You invite no man to dinner, Cotta, but your bath-companion; the baths alone provide you with a guest. I was wondering why you had never asked me; now I understand that when naked I displeased you.”
Invitas nullum nisi cum quo, Cotta, lavaris et dant convivam balnea sola tibi mirabar quare numquam me, Cotta, vocasses: iam scio me nudum displicuisse tibi.

Martial book Epigrammata

Invitas nullum nisi cum quo, Cotta, lavaris
et dant convivam balnea sola tibi
mirabar quare numquam me, Cotta, vocasses:
iam scio me nudum displicuisse tibi.
I, 23 (Loeb translation).
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)

Understanding

“Have I not found a happy earth?
I least should breathe a thought of pain.
Would God renew me from my birth
I'd almost live my life again.
So sweet it seems with thee to walk,
And once again to woo thee mine —
It seems in after-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

"The Miller's Daughter" (1832)

Life, God, Pain, Happiness

“A revolution is not a dinner party”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Chapter 2 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch02.htm, originally published in Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_2.htm (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28. https://www.marxists.org/chinese/big5/nonmarxists/mao/19270300.htm.湖南農民運動考察報告 Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book) Context: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

“The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage. Our people have more to eat, better things to wear, and better homes.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover (1928), Campaign speech in New York (22 October 1928)
Context: Our people are steadily increasing their spending for higher standards of living. Today there are almost nine automobiles for each ten families, where seven and one-half years ago only enough automobiles were running to average less than four for each ten families. The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage. Our people have more to eat, better things to wear, and better homes.

People, Home, Change

“Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 4.21 
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

Baby

“Most men think dramatically, not quantitatively, a fact that the rich would be wise to remember more than they do. We are apt to contrast the palace with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success. (Subordinate prizes — since the only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.)”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

1910s, "Law and the Court" (1913)

Men, Thinking, Success

“I can do which I like, and whichever way I decide, no more energy is developed in the fall of the weight. I strike a match; I can use it to light a cigarette or to set fire to a house. I write a telegram; it may be simply to say I shall be late for dinner, or it may produce fluctuations on the stock exchange that will ruin thousands. In these cases the actual force required in striking the match or in writing the telegram is governed by the law or conservation of energy; but the vastly more momentous part, which determines the words I use or the material I ignite, is beyond such a law.”

William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist

Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: The clock runs down. I lift the weight by exerting the proper amount of energy, and in this action the law of conservation of energy is strictly obeyed. But now I have the choice of either letting the weight fall free in a fraction of a second, or, constrained by the wheelwork, in twenty-four hours. I can do which I like, and whichever way I decide, no more energy is developed in the fall of the weight. I strike a match; I can use it to light a cigarette or to set fire to a house. I write a telegram; it may be simply to say I shall be late for dinner, or it may produce fluctuations on the stock exchange that will ruin thousands. In these cases the actual force required in striking the match or in writing the telegram is governed by the law or conservation of energy; but the vastly more momentous part, which determines the words I use or the material I ignite, is beyond such a law. It is probable that no expenditure of energy need be used in the determination of direction one way more than another. Intelligence and free will here come into play, and these mystic forces are outside the law of conservation of energy as understood by physicists.

Law, Way, Light, Parting

“If Government half a century ago had provided us all with dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators to-day to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.”

Auberon Herbert (1838–1906) British politician

State Education: A Help or Hindrance?
Context: If must also be remembered that, unless men are left to their own resources, they do not know what is or what is not possible for them. If Government half a century ago had provided us all with dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators to-day to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.

“I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous.”

Elbert Hubbard book A Message to Garcia

A Message to Garcia (1899)
Context: Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds — the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off" nor has to go on a strike for higher wages.

Men

“That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who being often asked out to dinner never refuses to go.”
Facile contemnitur clericus, qui saepe vocatus ad prandium, ire non recusat.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 52
Letters

“We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations — we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

Marriage, Sleep, Funny

“The details of wasted money spent on the Garden Bridge project is the final confirmation of the utter folly of the project. The Garden Bridge Trust have squandered public money in a way no responsible charity should have behaved. No charity needs to spend £160,000 on a website or over £400,000 on a gala dinner.”

Caroline Pidgeon (1972) British politician

Failed London Garden Bridge project cost £53m https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-47228698, BBC News, 13 February 2019 2010s, 2019

Money, Way

“Cleverness of speech was a quality which nearly all the young men of the time sought to attain, but Cato was singular in his keeping up the severe traditions of his ancestors in labouring with his own hands, eating a simple dinner, lighting no fire to cook his breakfast, wearing a plain dress, living in a mean house, and neither coveting superfluities nor courting their possessors.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Marcus Cato, sec. 4
Parallel Lives

Men, Light, Time, Housing

“Some writers write every morning, or every day. I don´t tend to do that. I am of the Wendy Wasserstein mind. Going to the movies is research. Walking down Central Park and seeing cute boys in tank tops is research. Going to the Museum of Modern Art is research. Having dinner with my best friends is research. Because research, when it comes to being a playwright, most importantly means living. It means experiencing and engaging with the world…”

Christopher Oscar Peña

On his research process in “"a cautionary tale" part II: Interview with Playwright Christopher Oscar Peña” http://www.theaterspeak.org/2013/07/part-ii-of-cautionary-tale-at-flea.html (Theaterspeak; 2013 Jul 15)

World, Art, Boy

“To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable.”

Adrienne Kennedy (1931) African-American playwright

On her parents in “Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy” https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/04/unraveling-the-landscape-a-conversation-with-adrienne-kennedy/ in American Theatre (September 2019)

Children, People, Home, Imagination

“All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 1, “Broca’s Brain” (pp. 13-14)

World, School, Way, Understanding

“We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful in detecting elements, for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should not find, if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the playhouse, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — many old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise, and more slight in its performance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Women, Men, Books, Strong

“What else is there which you would regret to have taken from you? Friends? But who can be a friend to you? Country? What? Do you think enough of your country to be late to dinner? The light of the sun? You would extinguish it, if you could; for what have you ever done that was fit to be seen in the light?”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXVII: On Taking One’s Own Life

Thinking, Light, Sun, Country

“He was one of the few judges who could occasionally poke fun at himself. He told me that once he was sitting at a dinner at the Cambridge University where a number of distinguished persons had been invited. Next to him was an elderly gentleman whose identity he did not know. There was some discussion about the theory of relativity and he aired his own views with a certain measure of authority. His neighbour told him that his views were interesting and invited him for a cup of tea in the next two or three days. Later on he found out that he had been talking to the world renowned physicist Sir Arthur Eddington who was reputed as one of the few persons apart from Einstein who understood the theory of relativity. He never picked up the courage to go for that cup of tea and face Sir Arthur Eddington.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

M.H. Kania
Full Court Reference in Memory of The Late Justice M. Hidayatullah

World, Courage, Universe, Tea

“I always had the feeling that Ohlendorf was spiritually depressed. I mentioned several times to my wife, when we had Ohlendorf to dinner, that he seemed like a man who just could not be happy. Ohlendorf must have been very depressed on account of that experience. He could not laugh heartily - and a man who cannot is either depressed, or sick, or bad. I thought he had something in his soul which bothered him.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

Walther Funk to Leon Goldensohn, April 7, 1946.

Bad luck, Happiness, Feeling, Soul

“Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet.”

Harlan Ellison book Eidolons

We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.
"Eidolons" (1988)

Heart

“I'm very inappropriate, which makes me a problem dinner guest, because at some point during the evening someone inevitably says, "OK, heh heh heh, OK, too much information!”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Heh heh heh. Don't go there!" I live there. I bought a house there.
From Her Tours and CDs, Revolution Tour

Making love, Problem

“More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day.
Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools, and other organizations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to United Way mean forgone movies, dinners out, or other personal pleasures. In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.
Moreover, this pledge does not leave me contributing the most precious asset, which is time. Many people, including — I’m proud to say — my three children, give extensively of their own time and talents to help others. Gifts of this kind often prove far more valuable than money.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

" My Philanthropic Pledge http://givingpledge.org/pdf/letters/Buffett_Letter.pdf" at The Giving Pledge (2010)

Death, Money, Children, People

“In strong families, positive strokes out-number negative broadsides by a wide margin. Members regularly express appreciation: "Thanks for fixing the drainpipe." "You look so nice in that dress." "The dinner was great."”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

Criticism is offered gently. After all, strong families figure, if we can be kind to strangers, why not to one another?
10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Family, Strong

“We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Pleasure, Help, Christmas

“We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our window to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Making love, Appearance

“That's the end of my free dinners in Cavan!”

Martin McHugh (1961) Gaelic football player

Response https://www.bbc.com/sport/live/northern-ireland/54974697 on the BBC to Cavan's next Ulster SFC title win in 2020.

“Animals who die for your dinner table die alone, in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is merciless and inhumane. … Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. Most spend their last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animals and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber. Animals which are a year old are often far more rational – and capable of logical thought – than six-week-old babies. Pigs and sheep are far more intelligent than small children.”

Vernon Coleman (1946) British doctor

"Twenty One Reasons For Being A Vegetarian" (2007), in vernoncoleman.com http://www.vernoncoleman.com/twentyoner.htm.

Death, Pain, Children, Sadness

“"You must tell them that there must be a new union or there will be chaos," he [Shevardnadze] implored me. That evening, when I hosted republic leaders for dinner — a mixed group of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers — I saw around the table and in the conversation a microcosm of the post-coup Soviet Union’s potential — and its problems. Whatever euphoria that they felt with their post-putsch independence declarations had given way to a marked degree of realism. "Independence sounds nice, but we have to live, and we have to be practical," observed the Prime Minister of Moldova, Valeriu Muravsky. That was the persistent theme that I heard from every one of the republic leaders, with the sole exception of the Georgian Prime Minister, Vissarion Gugushvili, though even he spoke of the need for economic cooperation once Georgian independence was recognized internationally.”

James Baker (1930) Former U.S. Secretary of State

The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace 1989-1992 (1995) by James Addison Baker, p. 531
1990s

Way, Problem

“Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it's sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.”

Susan Cain book Bittersweet

Bittersweet, Chapter 2 at p. 36

Sadness, Music, Dance

“I have been a vegetarian all my life, as has my family, including all my dogs. Even when my father, a nonvegetarian, comes home for dinner, he has to eat vegetarian fare.”

Esha Deol (1981) Indian actress

Quoted in "Sexiest Veggies" https://web.archive.org/web/20121001155636/http://www.ndtv.com/photos/entertainment/anupama-verma-sizzles-for-peta-574/slide/10, NDTV.com (1 October 2012).

Life, Family, Dogs, Home

“You will never make love, laugh, fight, eat, go to the movies, kiss, smile, dance, sing, run, skate, play the piano, buy candy for, argue jokingly, tell stories, look longingly at, jump on the bed with, pet the dogs with your faces, sing along with the song in the car and get the words wrong, share a secret, gossip, cop a feel, go hear a band that you both love, share a really good meal, carpool with people you don't like and make fun of them secretly later, cry, comfort, scratch backs, insist on pizza, catch them staring at you, put your arms around them, stay up too late, lean against warm bodies, feel safe with their feet sliding next to yours in bed, raise your children, go to boring dinner parties and get too drunk to drive home so you sleep in the car, spend alternate holidays with each others families, have uncontrollable lust with, followed by mind blowing fuck sessions lasting for hours and hours at a time, take a bath so hot one of you has to get out, all naked and wet and red and dizzy but not embarrassed because this is who you love and rarely are you shy with them, watch a TV show you both hate because the remote control is broken--merely happily, and maybe sometimes unhappily, share your life, and be with them, but you can't, because they're dead. Suddenly, unjustly, untimely, irretrievably--unconscionably dead.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, DEATH

Love, Life, Hate, Children

Quotes about dinner page 4

Quotes about dinner
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