I let myself exist mainly through my children... [but] I could not even guess at the lives my children led.

— M.F.K. Fisher

Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant, and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways.

— M.F.K. Fisher

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the mounting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangeries. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....

— M.F.K. Fisher

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.

— M.F.K. Fisher

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. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

— 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

I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.

— M.F.K. Fisher

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

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

— M.F.K. Fisher

Our dispassionate acceptance of attrition...[can] be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind from his body.

— M.F.K. Fisher