M. F. K. Fisher Quotes
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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.
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Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.
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Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.
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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.
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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.
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It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.
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Hunger is more than a problem of belly and guts, and ... the satisfying of it can and must and does nourish the spirit as well as the body.
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Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.
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A potato is a poor thing, poorly treated. More often than not it is cooked in so unthinking and ignorant a manner as to make one feel that it has never before been encountered in the kitchen.
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I live with carpe diem engraved on my heart.
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There are many people like me who believe firmly, if somewhat incoherently, that pockets on this planet are filled with what humans have left behind them, both good and evil, and that any such spiritual accumulation can stay there forever, past definition of such a stern word.
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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.
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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.
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. . . 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 . . .
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An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.
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. . . 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.
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In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.
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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.
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There is a mistaken idea, ancient but still with us, that an overdose of anything from fornication to hot chocolate will teach restraint by the very results of its abuse.
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Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough.
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Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.
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It is hard and perhaps impossible for many people to recognize the difference between innocence and naiveté.
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old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.
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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.
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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 . . . .
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Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she, and may start at any moment, after the first year, to lay eggs where before he spent his sexual energies in being exceptionally masculine.
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Salad is roughage and a French idea.
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Cooks must feed their egos as well as their customers.
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France eats more conciously, more intelligently, than any other nation.
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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.
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