Top 80 M.F.K. Fisher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “First we eat, then we do everything else.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

3. “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.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

4. “When shall we live if not now?”

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

6. “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

7. “I live with carpe diem engraved on my heart.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

13. “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

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

15. “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

24. “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

25. “There’s a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

30. “I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best...”

— M.F.K. Fisher

31. “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.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

32. “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

33. “Salad is roughage and a French idea.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

37. “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

38. “All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are rich or poor.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

40. “Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

41. “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

42. “We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

43. “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

44. “An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.”

— M.F.K. Fisher

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

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

— M.F.K. Fisher

49. “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

50. “Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.”

— M.F.K. Fisher