Flavor is, counterintuitively, less than 10% taste and more than 90% smell.

It wasn't often that I had difficulty tasting something. Flavor was the way people like me made sense of the world.
We knew that there was a flavor that explained you-even to yourself. A flavor whose truth you recognized when you tasted it. A flavor that answered the question you didn't know you had.
Perhaps it was a voluptuous vanilla that your sharp-edged self could sink into like a pillow. Or a homesick pomegranate, each seed like a ruby slipper that would take you back to the place where you were loved and where people had missed you.

It was as though he had secrets, and he wanted you to know he would keep them for the pleasure of depriving you of their taste.

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

World barista champions use the AeroPress to make coffee on the folding tray tables of airplanes.