"You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like
feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!"
— M.F.K. Fisher (The Art of Eating)

"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 (The Art of Eating)

"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."
— M.F.K. Fisher

"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

"(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another...the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthood and childhood.)

That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister's fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity."
— M.F.K. Fisher (The Gastronomical Me)

"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 (How to Cook a Wolf)

"Like most humans, I am hungry...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. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it..."
— M.F.K. Fisher (The Gastronomical Me)

"Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again.

It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world's sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably 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

"It's really fine that you found a good archivist to do the basically difficult and at times harrowing work of cleaning out old papers. I hope you keep her digging into all the old boxes as long as there is ONE left."
— M.F.K. Fisher

"...it was one of the best meals we ever ate.

Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so.

Now the hills are cut through with superhighways, and I can't say whether we sat that night in Mint Canyon or Bouquet, and the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts' palates, succulent, secret, delicious."
— M.F.K. Fisher (The Gastronomical Me)

"First we eat, then we do everything else."
— M.F.K. Fisher

"Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken."
— M.F.K. Fisher

"A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove."
— M.F.K. Fisher

"When shall we live if not now?"
— M.F.K. Fisher