M. F. K. Fisher Quotes - Page 4

I wrote like a junkie. I had to have my daily fix.

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.

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.

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 . . . .

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.

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.

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.

There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom.

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.

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.

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.

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

. . . 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 . . .

old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.

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.

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

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.

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.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

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.

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.

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.

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.