M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

87 Sourced Quotes

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine 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
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
Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

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

M. F. K. Fisher
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
[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
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
In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us. We are ignorant of flavor. We are as a nation taste-blind.

M. F. K. Fisher
Ostentatious dining has little dignity about it, although the combination is possible.

M. F. K. Fisher
We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.

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

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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
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
Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak. What is more, they need a steak. Preferably they need it rare, grilled, heavily salted, for that way it is most easily digested, and most quickly turned into the glandular whip their tired adrenals cry for.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
And like you, I remain as always strikingly beautiful, even though nobody knows it but me.

M. F. K. Fisher
Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.

M. F. K. Fisher
Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.

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

M. F. K. Fisher
There can be no more shameless carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.

M. F. K. Fisher
Hate seemed to crackle out of him in little flashes, like electricity in a cat's fur.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...

M. F. K. Fisher