M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

87 Sourced Quotes

The cold truth is that 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
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
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
Living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerfully strange things to humans.

M. F. K. Fisher
We ate terrines of pate ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed fat. We tied napkins under our chins and splashed in great odorous bowls of ecrevisses a la nage. We addled our palates with snipes hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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
It was one of the best meals we ever ate. Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so.

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

M. F. K. Fisher
When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner.

M. F. K. Fisher
I know only one person who ever crossed the ocean without feeling it, either spiritually or physically.... he went from Oklahoma to France and back again... without ever getting off dry land. He remembers several places I remember too, and several French words, but he says firmly, "We must of went different ways. I don't rightly recollect no water, ever."

M. F. K. Fisher
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
Old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.

M. F. K. Fisher
After rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news.

M. F. K. Fisher
France eats more consciously, more intelligently, than any other nation.

M. F. K. Fisher
Like most humans, I am hungry... 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.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
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
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
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
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
Gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.

M. F. K. Fisher
Talleyrand said that two things are essential in life: to give good dinners and to keep on fair terms with women. As the years pass and fires cool, it can become unimportant to stay always on fair terms either with women or one's fellows, but a wide and sensitive appreciation of fine flavours can still abide with us, to warm our hearts.

M. F. K. Fisher
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
Too few of us, perhaps, feel that the 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
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
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