M.F.K. Fisher Quotes & Sayings

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

Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways. — M.F.K. Fisher

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was there [Dijon], I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be. It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy because he knows something that I may never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know. — 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

Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations. — 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 ... dining in a good home. — 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 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

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

One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough. — M.F.K. Fisher

There can be no more shameless carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. — 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

I never accepted the plain truth that I myself could hold no interest, no appeal, for the cool, gracious old lady. It was a kind of rebuff that perhaps Americans, very warm, generous, naive people, are especially attuned to. I explained it to myself. Spiritually, we are fresh children, unable to realize that other peoples are infinitely older and wearier than we. We do not yet know much world-pain, except vicariously. Europeans who grow bored or exasperated with our enthusiasm are not simply feeling superior to us; there is also tolerance and understanding, which we are as yet incapable of recognizing. — M.F.K. Fisher

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

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

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 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

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

Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto. — 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

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

I kept wishing with real regret that I were capable of living in such continued simplicity. But I am not. Sometimes I honestly want to live in a plain room with a narrow bed, a chair, a table. But then I would need a bookcase. I would see a poster I must put on the wall. I would pick up a shell here, a bowl or vase there, another poster, enough books for two bookcases, a soft rug someone might give me--and where would the first plainness be? I cannot fight too hard against it, but I regret it. — M.F.K. Fisher

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

...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

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

Living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerfully strange things to humans. — M.F.K. Fisher

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

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

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

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

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

Death ... so seldom happens nowadays in the awesome quiet of a familiar chamber. Most of us die violently, thanks to the advance of science and warfare. If by chance we are meant to end life in our beds, we are whisked like pox victims to the nearest hospital, where we are kept as alone and unaware as possible of the approach of disintegration. — 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

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooks must feed their egos as well as their customers ... — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions. — M.F.K. Fisher

Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love. — 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 it is all one. — M.F.K. Fisher

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

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

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

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

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

She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind. — 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

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

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

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

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. — 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

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 live with carpe diem engrave on my heart. — 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

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