Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and James Joyce’s Dubliners. - Katherine Anne Porter

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers.

[From The Jilting of Granny Weatherall]

You waste life when you waste good food.

the moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.