M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

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.

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

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

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.

Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.

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.

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.

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight

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.

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

When shall we live if not now?

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.

I live with carpe diem engraved on my heart.

France eats more conciously, more intelligently, than any other nation.

gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.

One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.

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

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.

Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.

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.

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

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.

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.

It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it

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.