Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit.

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.

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.

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.

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.

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

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.

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

Life is hard, we say. An oyster's life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation.

When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

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.

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.

Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.

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.

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

In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.