Awe Inspiring Quotes

I don't know what I was hoping for. Some small praise, I guess. A bit of encouragement. I didn't get it. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out. She said she'd read my stories and found them morbid and dispiriting. She said literature was meant to uplift the heart and that a young woman such as myself ought to turn her mind to topics more cheerful and inspiring than lonely hermits and dead children. "Look around yourself, Mathilda," she said. "At the magnificence of nature. It should inspire joy and awe. Reverence. Respect. Beautiful thoughts and fine words." I had looked around. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. I'd seen a bear cub lift it's face to the drenching spring rains. And the sliver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I'd seen them and loved them. But I'd also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest days.

We tasted the Vegetable menu, an exploration through the garden with awe-inspiring presentations of ingredients we so often take for granted. Take, for example, the potato, usually served baked, fried, boiled, steamed. Here they return the potato to its humble beginning, the ground, but in the world of Noma, it arrives in the form of potato soup served in a terracotta pot, topped with a garden of herbs. While potatoes are often a favorite staple of a meal, it was refreshing to be surprised by this dish. It was a hint of what else was to come. Other dishes are crafted from ingredients that are transformed through experimental cooking techniques; onions that are cooked until they resembled lumps of charcoal, with sweet, almost gooey centers, fermented ants that taste of pickled ginger and lemongrass, or plums, dried and fermented until they could easily be confused with cured meat.