There was the sudden pleasure of having breakfast alone with the man one fell in love with. Here at the small table, are only two people facing each other. How the table at home has grown! And how distracting it is, with four or five children, a telephone ringing in the hall, two or three school buses to catch, not to speak of the commuter’s train. How all this separates one from one’s husband and clogs up the pure relationship. But sitting at a table alone opposite each other, what is there to separate one? Nothing but a coffee pot, corn muffins and marmalade. A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

El problema con el matrimonio es que se acaba todas las noches después de hacer el amor, y hay que volver a reconstruirlo todas las mañanas antes del desayuno.

Breakfast was, on the whole, a leisurely and silent meal, for no member of the family was very talkative at that hour. By the end of the meal the influence of the coffee, toast, and eggs made itself felt, and we started to revive, to tell each other what we intended to do, why we intended to do it, and then argue earnestly as to whether each had made a wise decision.

One year after I moved out of my house and my marriage, I wrote an essay for Glamour titled “I’m a Great Cook. Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Making Dinner for a Man Again.” The article outlined how for eleven years I’d cooked meals for my husband and then for our children. I had liked cooking. I loved it even. I thought of food as my offerings of love. But as our marriage dragged on, cooking became less of a joy and more of an obligation. When my marriage ended, I stopped cooking. “I stopped cooking because I wanted to feel as unencumbered as man walking through the door of his home with the expectation that something had been done for him,” I wrote. “I wanted to be free of cutting coupons and rolling dough and worrying about dinner times and feeding. I wanted to rest.

Sometimes, in a relationship, we fail to put two and two together because we want so much to keep one and one together.

The Wrath is what Peter named my mood before eight in the morning. Our marriage might’ve survived if we’d only had to do afternoons.

We could never have hit it off for long. There was never anything but love to keep us together.

Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever. If you’re married for 30 years and you’re making breakfast for the one you love and and he walks in, does your heart skip a beat? Anyway, it’s nice to have a little breakfast made for you

Many marriages falter, it seems to me, not because the couples are out of love, but because they have never been friends as much as lovers. They may love each other, in a vaporously romantic way, but they do not really like each other as individual personalities.

The conversation at dinner hadn't been successful either; it bore the marks of an old married couple who had very little left to say to each other.

Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

One should not attend even the end of the world without a good breakfast.