Portugal was the beginning, where I began to notice the things that were missing from the average American dining experience. The large groups of peo… - Anthony Bourdain

Middle-class women, like everybody else, were redefining their roles in society, redefining themselves – and having too good a time doing it for the reverend’s taste. Quiet, demure, compliant women – whose sole purpose in life had previously been to get married and raise kids and run a household for their husbands, however brutish those husbands might have been, were being replaced by brainy, assertive, cigarette-smoking, self-indulgent ‘new women’, for whom the twentieth century promised new pleasures and real choices.

Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire — to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past — or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty. Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.

I learned to recognize failure.