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Quote by Joseph C. Jenkins

“A young English couple was visiting with me one summer after I had been composting humanure for about six years. One evening, as dinner was being prepared, the couple suddenly understood the horrible reality of their situation: the food they were about to eat was recycled human shit. When this fact abruptly dawned upon them, it seemed to set off an instinctive alarm, possibly inherited directly from Queen Victoria. "We don't want to eat shit!" they informed me, rather distressed (that's an exact quote), as if in preparing dinner I had simply set a steaming turd on a plate in front of them with a knife, fork and napkin.”

Quote by Joseph C. Jenkins

Book:The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
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The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure

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Joseph C. Jenkins

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“Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste.”

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Book:The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
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“Thin sheets of warm roti and mana'eesh are best for scooping food from plate to mouth like tactile, edible cutlery, but bread is better for sponging up the delicious detritus from the plate. The soft, open crumb swells with cream or curry sauce, gravy or meat juices, to leave us replete. A Chinese host may take a mopped plate as a sign that more food is needed, yet I would rather think of each painterly flourish as a signature, a thank-you note to the cook.”

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Book:A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts
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“He looks up and notices the Plexiglas box on the rickety shelf above the toilet and his eyes grow two sizes bigger. He looks at me and back at the trophy. "Is that a fucking Stanley Cup ring?" "Yeah. Jude's first," I explain. "He gave it to my dad. Dad used to keep it here. It was a prized possession in his favorite place." "In the shitter?" Holden is both stunned and horrified as he rises to his feet and leans forward to admire it. "He kept it on his dresser, where he could see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night." I say and I almost smile as I explain the rest. "But Sadie, Dixie and I always move it to the bathroom. At first, Jude actually thought Dad kept it there, but then he realized it was our way of keeping him humble. Reminding him rings and trophies mean shit to us. He still has to be a good person." Holden chuckles and I'm surprised by how good it feels to make him laugh. "You girls sure know how to keep a guy in place ... and dishonor a symbol of the hardest trophy to win in sports.”

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“He took the slide of and, before she could stop him, removed the glass top and licked the sample. She fought the urge to gag. He didn't seem at all bothered. He stood quite still, closing his eyes, and then said, "Hmmm. A bit salty, bitter aftertaste...iron...hydroxide." He smiled then, and looked at her as if he was quite proud of himself. "Definitely iron hydroxide. That is a binding agent, is it not?" "You are insane," she said. "You can't go around...licking things that come out of a water treatment plant. That's just...unsanitary." "Life is unsanitary," he said.”

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“It is life, more than death, that has no limits. Love becomes greater and nobler and mightier in calamity. We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a women decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root. There is no god worth worrying about. Let time pass and we will see what it brings. Humanity, like the armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest. Those of us who make the rules have the greatest obligation to abide by them. I don't believe in God but I am afraid of him. It's better to arrive in time than to be invited. Unfaithful but not disloyal. Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent. Nobody teaches life anything. The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. There is no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid and dangerous, than a poet. Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. One comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays and whoever doesn't use them for whatever reason, one's own and someone else's, willingly or unwillingly, looses them forever.”

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Author:Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
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“Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.”

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“His mother knew before he told her because he lost his voice and his appetite, and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed. But when he began to wait to the answer to his first letter, his anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit. He became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera….because he had the weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

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Book:Love in the Time of Cholera
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