M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

87 Sourced Quotes

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 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
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
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
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
A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet.

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

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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
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
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
Once at least in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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 the table.

M. F. K. Fisher
It is hard and perhaps impossible for many people to recognize the difference between innocence and naiveté.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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
It should always be seen, the first time, with the eyes of childhood or of love.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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
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
I think we grieve forever, but that goes for love too, fortunately for us all.

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

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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