...after rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favors or tell bad news.

— M.F.K. Fisher

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 poor or rich.

— 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

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its devastation as one of the human arts.

— M.F.K. Fisher

First we eat, then we do everything else.

— M.F.K. Fisher

...having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...

— 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

I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert the reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

If I were rich, I would buy him a new black suit. ... If I had next week's allowance and had not spent this week's on three Cherry Flips ...

— M.F.K. Fisher