Top 72 M.F.K. Fisher Quotes
#1. A pleasant aperitif, as well as a good chaser for a short quick whiskey, as well again for a fine supper drink, is beer.
M.F.K. Fisher
#2. Central heating, French rubber goods and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man's ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and, of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.
M.F.K. Fisher
#4. On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, 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
#5. Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.
M.F.K. Fisher
#6. Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough.
M.F.K. Fisher
#7. If time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.
M.F.K. Fisher
#8. Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.
M.F.K. Fisher
#9. Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.
M.F.K. Fisher
#10. Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.
M.F.K. Fisher
#11. There are many people like me who believe firmly, if somewhat incoherently, that pockets on this planet are filled with what humans have left behind them, both good and evil, and that any such spiritual accumulation can stay there forever, past definition of such a stern word.
M.F.K. Fisher
#12. Living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerfully strange things to humans.
M.F.K. Fisher
#13. A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#14. People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" ... The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.
M.F.K. Fisher
#15. I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.
M.F.K. Fisher
#16. A potato is a poor thing, poorly treated. More often than not it is cooked in so unthinking and ignorant a manner as to make one feel that it has never before been encountered in the kitchen ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#17. Word-sniffing ... is an addiction, like glue
or snow
sniffing in a somewhat less destructive way, physically if not economically ... As an addict, I am almost guiltily interested in converts to my own illness ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#18. Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, together. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#19. Hunger is more than a problem of belly and guts, and ... the satisfying of it can and must and does nourish the spirit as well as the body.
M.F.K. Fisher
#20. There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.
M.F.K. Fisher
#21. Life is hard, we say. An oyster's life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#22. I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#23. The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.
M.F.K. Fisher
#24. One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.
M.F.K. Fisher
#25. Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.
M.F.K. Fisher
#26. Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.
M.F.K. Fisher
#27. In spite of my conviction that a group of deliberately assembled relatives can be one of the dullest, if not most dangerous, gatherings in the world, I am smugly foolhardly enough to have invited all my available family, more than once, to dine with me.
M.F.K. Fisher
#28. At present, I myself do not know of any local witches or warlocks, but there are several people who seem to have an uncanny power over food.
M.F.K. Fisher
#29. For me, a plain baked potato is the most delicious one ... It is soothing and enough.
M.F.K. Fisher
#30. For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#31. It must not simply be taken for granted that a given set of ill-assorted people, for no other reason than because it is Christmas, will be joyful to be reunited and to break bread together.
M.F.K. Fisher
#32. In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us. We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind.
M.F.K. Fisher
#33. Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions.
M.F.K. Fisher
#34. Cooks must feed their egos as well as their customers ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#35. Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she, and may start at any moment, after the first year, to lay eggs where before he spent his sexual energies in being exceptionally masculine.
M.F.K. Fisher
#36. When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.
M.F.K. Fisher
#37. I wrote from the time I was four. It was my way of screaming and yelling, the primal scream. I wrote like a junkie, I had to have my daily fix.
M.F.K. Fisher
#38. There can be no more shameless carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.
M.F.K. Fisher
#40. It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.
M.F.K. Fisher
#41. Brioches are a light, pale yellow, faintly sweet kind of muffin with a characteristic blob on top, rather like a mushroom just pushing crookedly through the ground. Once eaten in Paris, they never taste as good anywhere else.
M.F.K. Fisher
#42. At its best, [Japanese cooking] is inextricably meshed with aesthetics, with religion, with tradition and history. It is evocative of seasonal changes, or of one's childhood, or of a storm at sea ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#44. [Bachelors'] approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.
M.F.K. Fisher
#46. One ... aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.
M.F.K. Fisher
#47. France eats more conciously, more intelligently, than any other nation.
M.F.K. Fisher
#48. ...he began to feel that he was really not talking to the woman at all, but that she was, with her strange smooth hair and her quiet way of drinking, his inner self, the true and only companion he could talk to lately, the one remaining friend...
M.F.K. Fisher
#49. Good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit.
M.F.K. Fisher
#50. What did the child-woman have to say except that she was happy to be living with Hubert--a big, pompous, grasping, scheming, conniving stud who used her at his will and shaped her affections and her tastes and in general raped her spirit.
M.F.K. Fisher
#51. War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.
M.F.K. Fisher
#52. There are may of us who cannot but feel dismal about the future of various cultures. Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment.
M.F.K. Fisher
#53. I like old people when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the timelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.
M.F.K. Fisher
#54. A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.
M.F.K. Fisher
#55. In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.
M.F.K. Fisher
#56. I think we grieve forever, but that goes for love too, fortunately for us all.
M.F.K. Fisher
#57. This is not that, and that is certainly not this, and at the same time an oyster stew is not stewed, and although they are made of the same things and even cooked almost the same way, an oyster soup should never be called a stew, nor stew soup.
M.F.K. Fisher
#58. Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.
M.F.K. Fisher
#59. Gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people ... dining in a good home.
M.F.K. Fisher
#60. Probably no strychnine has sent as many husbands into their graves as mealtime scolding has, and nothing has driven more men into the arms of other women as the sound of a shrill whine at table.
M.F.K. Fisher
#61. I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.
M.F.K. Fisher
#62. Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.
M.F.K. Fisher
#63. It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it.
M.F.K. Fisher
#64. I prefer not to have among my guests two people or more, of any sex, who are in the first wild tremours of love. It is better to invite them after their new passion has settled, has solidified into a quieter reciprocity of emotions. (It is also a waste of good food, to serve it to new lovers.)
M.F.K. Fisher
#65. There is a mistaken idea, ancient but still with us, that an overdose of anything from fornication to hot chocolate will teach restraint by the very results of its abuse.
M.F.K. Fisher
#66. Gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.
M.F.K. Fisher
#67. Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.
M.F.K. Fisher
#68. Too few of us, perhaps, feel that breaking of bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, mean more than satisfaction of a need. We make such primal things as casual as tunes heard over a radio, forgetting the mystery and strength in both.
M.F.K. Fisher
#69. Old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.
M.F.K. Fisher
#70. Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.
M.F.K. Fisher
#71. The things men come to eat when they are alone are, I suppose, not much stranger than the men themselves ... A writer years ago told me of living for five months on hen mash.
M.F.K. Fisher
#72. When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.
M.F.K. Fisher
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