M. F. K. Fisher Quotes (20 Quotes)

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

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

. . . most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers they want a steak.

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

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.

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.

When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. But at six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appears before him.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

. . . 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 . . .

There are many 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.

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.

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.

. . . 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.

Salad is roughage and a French idea.

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 . . . .