M. F. K. Fisher famous quotes

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Smell #Water #Sound

First we eat, then we do everything else.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Firsts

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Writing #Reality

There is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Yoga #Exercise #Meditation

Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Secret #Likes #Persons

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Lying #Years #Patterns

Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Simple #Cheese #Sophisticated

No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Yoga #Humble #Exercise

Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Hurt #Food #Drinking

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Art #Years #Preparation

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Past #Men #Thinking

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Heart #Wine #Self

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Love #Food #Health

When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Men #Beast

I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Thinking #Hands

When shall we live if not now?
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Worry #Anxiety

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Thinking #Cooking #And Love

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Littles #Detachment

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

#Drinking #Struggle #Writing

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Snow #Too Much

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

#Kitchen #Rotten #May

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

#Thinking #Meals #Soup

For me, a plain baked potato is the most delicious one....It is soothing and enough.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Vegetables #Potatoes #Enough

All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are rich or poor.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Cutting #Men

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Believe #Food #Men

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Eggs #Broken

It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Philosophy #Real #Order

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

#Beer #Whiskey #Drink

. . . 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

#Snow #Addiction #Glue

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Fun #Language #Reassuring

Salad is roughage and a French idea.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Ideas #Salad

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

#Dream #Book #Reading

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Writing #Ends #Periods

I like old people when they have aged well.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#People #Old People #Wells

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

#Yelling #Four #Way

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

#Food #Writing #Hunger

There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Wine #Drunk

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Weak #Convalescence #Refuse

I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Love #Thinking #Two

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

#Food #Thinking #Tables

I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Thinking #Self #Saws

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Isms #Painting #Whim

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

#Night #Eight #Upset

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

#Happiness #Weed #Numbers

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

#True Friend #Beer #Two

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Real #Self #Gourmet

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

#Fleeting #Good Food #Perfume

It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#War #Men #Thinking

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

#People #Witch #Uncanny

As for the house, it is scrubbed to the tiniest mousehole before Passover, to avoid such dangers as even a forgotten cake crumb might cause. Passover dishes are probably the most interesting of any in the Jewish cuisine because of the lack of leaven and the resulting challenge to fine cooks.... Everything is doubly rich, as if to compensate for the lack of leaven... [W]oes are forgotten in the pleasures of the table, for if the Mosaic laws are rightly followed, no man need fear true poison in his belly, but only the results of his own gluttony.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Men #Law #Cake

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

#Wine #Thinking #Bottles

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Food #Yoga #Exercise

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

#Spiritual #Believe #Past

I cannot count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#People #Mind #Would Be

A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Writing #Cooking #Desks

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

#Hate #Men #Years

. . . 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

#Sex #Home #Two

Good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Wine #Drunk #Majesty

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

#War #Food #Communication

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

#Memorable #Jitters #Dinner

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

#Husband #Food #Men

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

#Mean #Tunes #Needs

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

#America #Ignorant #Culture

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

#War #Beastly #Proof

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

#Art #Men #Three

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Oysters #Exciting

I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Pain #War #Believe

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

#Ideas #Chocolate #Abuse

I live with carpe diem engraved on my heart.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Heart #Carpe Diem #Engraved

Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.
-- M. F. K. Fisher

#Prayer #Soul #Bereavement