An oyster is a fish built like a nut. – Anonymous

If you don’t love life you can’t enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. – Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1964)

A flaccid, moping, debauched mollusk, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell. – M. F. K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster (1941) — on why you shouldn’t eat oysters in the warm weather months.