Land of Milk and Honey Quotes

“We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Imagine Persephone for the first time in the absolute intoxication of dark, her senses stretching languid, the cave as moist as lover's breath. The feast, the chair, the plate, the fruit: red. Imagine a story whose moral is mute desire.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Religion is a flimsy construction of rituals infused with arbitrary power. The gestures have always been empty; behind them stand hustlers no different from you. All that is required is a convincing performance.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“There is time on this greener earth for girls to ripen into themselves; what they'll do with that is beyond anyone's knowing, seeing as they are not limited to anger versus dinner, seriousness versus sentiment, survival versus all life's rampancy. They can choose.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“And so the milk ran dry. But first we had the luck of those creams, those spilled-down sauces, that summer of appetite that began with a soufflé cheesecake. There are very few ingredients to the recipe. Butter doesn't make the cake, nor cream. Its secret is ephemerality. Pull it from the oven and it is perfect; the next moment it is cooling, flattening, collapsing beneath the gravity of time. This is a flavor untasted by diners and critics, no record of its existence but for a private memory that lingers on one or two tongues.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Close to the stem, he said, closest to the earth, their perfume is complex, not sugar: closer to flesh, the flesh of a loved one, not sanitized, not anodyne, but full of many waters. Strawberries and spring, strawberries and musk, strawberries and sex flooded back as I crushed my tongue to sugar.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I’d learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“You believe in a country that does not exist as you imagine it, in a code of morality as fanciful as any creation myth. What do you call that if not blind faith?”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we’d been promised was a scam,”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I refused to be stuck. In Pasaje, California. In the smallness of my mother's life. In a fixed notion of my cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness--myself.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Real food is whatever cooks are proud to make.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Under a man's hands--crush of his body--exigent breath--I remembered how to perform. Yes when I meant no. Lust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man's disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence, as pungent and close-fitting as skin. One pound of flesh, paid freely, was preferable to a bloodier extraction. My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I'd learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“How can I describe my life in the years leading up to this moment except in shades of gray? All the scrape and grind of it, all the empty shelves and lost ambition, all the soot grown hard on windows, season after season the only black harvest. The bad news, the debts, the visa applications, the flesh of your arm humping white between a nurse's fingers as she stuck you with a paltry twelve months' protection against whatever new strain of disease, as if bankruptcy or homelessness or a weariness at aping at the motions of life weren't more likely to kill you first.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I want, I said, to be a tree. She thought it was the drugs speaking. I was asleep before I could share the secret I once learned of a pomegranate orchard's prodigious growth: Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“On Sunday, we slathered brioche with cultured butter, dolloped crème fraîche on daubes, and spooned a pudding of Aida's creation. The interior was so creamy it recalled the molten center of the earth. If the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“In hidden orchards the stone fruit ripened so fast that what we didn't eat was given to the animals, and so like chimps like finches like gilas we glutted on plums so ripe they split if looked at, cherries and blackberries staining our sheets. We distilled summer meads heady with anise and yogurt, and watered fields with the barrels' dregs. To the tidal boom of an underground aquarium, I cut a sturgeon nose to slit and ransacked its body for that other fruit, pure caviar. I looked to Aida for the salt. Sweaty, unshowered, her pubis its own rough ocean. Saline, the meat of her as she bucked against my tongue, split open, gleaming.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in. Not for me the solace of boeuf bourguignon; not for me red wine and browned butter, that unctuousness proximate to rot or burning that stickied a diner's tongue. I had lived too long in the low country. I had tasted bitter gray. Only ashes and lost empires in the crust of a kouign amann that would never shatter the same way again.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss.
To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Either Jupiter or Saturn was still visible, pale against the lightening sky. The wind was blustery and full of voices. I sat as sun lipped the horizon. The grass changed in the light, from brown to yellowish to green. The grass: it was green.
It was the end of March. I'd been in the country for three weeks. All around me, as if the scales had fallen from my eyes, I saw color flushing the slopes, a color I'd never again hoped to see: that green that is the herald of flavor and pleasure, that says: look, says: wait, says: taste: the gates of the underworld unlatched for mints and sorrels and pine-dark needles in shade and the pale sun-swell of the honeysuckle that bells out the triumphant return, after long winter, of a daughter. It was a green made possible by a man who held in his sway horticulturalists and biologists and chicken geneticists and meteorologists who could control the weather itself, and I forgot those wan, distant orbs in the sky as I opened my mouth, I bayed.
And then, at last, it was spring.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Strawberries sat abandoned in the fields by season's end, so ripe as to be barely solid, warm as heart's blood. Ambrosia, they call that variety, the food of gods. But the hubris of excess has mortal consequences. You can go blind, mad, drown in red. The second nature of strawberries is a sugar that turns to rot.
They reappeared one by one as I vomited, shapeless and no longer sweet, those little, used, red hearts.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living. I took my cigarette to the filter, and for the first time I appraised my employer back. He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, tear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“This was the summer of my de-extinction, of life streaming back to its source.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“It’s just as hard to miss disaster as it is to bear witness. If you don’t see—you keep imagining.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I asked her, what kind of god kills the bees and leaves the rapists alive?”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“The guard touched her throat. ——— —— —————— —, she said, and let me pass.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I starved for so long I feared my own hunger for a wolf at the door. She let out the muscled animal of my tongue. Panting, teeth small nipped stars, she switched off the lights. In the slippery dark of her I dissolved, no troubled body or changed face, only this felt through touch, through taste, through scent and breath and pulsing absolution of night, and: Yes to oysters swollen through butter. Yes to things cooled on glass, my hand a hot knife between. Yes to proscuitto, its salt slick, to avocado bursting, ripe. Our teeth clanged. I tasted blood and chocolate. Yes to the fathicksweet of it, to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that join at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite. Three years can you imagine...no lovers no family no feasts...and suddenly this largesse of freckles down her torso, this churning, spilling free.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“out spilled the perfumed wrappers of another meal. I wept; I would have preferred an affair to a snack.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey