M.F.K. Fisher Quotes

I quote fictional characters, because I'm a fictional character myself!

We're not very dangerous animals; we don't have a horn like a rhino or quills like a porcupine.

There is always need for good foster parents, people who have room in their homes, the openhearted people.

The nation is marching along a permanently high plateau of prosperity

The rate of interest acts as a link between income-value and capital-value.

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.

You know how I always seem to be struggling, even when the situation doesn't call for it?

I do believe you're only as sick as your secrets.

I have heard it remarked that men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion they have not reasoned themselves into.

Barriers tend to intensify romance. It's called the 'Romeo and Juliet effect.' I call it 'frustration attraction.'

I've never been a waif; I have a womanly figure and always did.

No efforts of mine could avail to make the book easy reading.

I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.

Life balances itself on a precarious ledge, we can stay safe up high or propel off the edge.

FISHER SEES STOCKS PERMANENTLY HIGH

Look,' he said, 'I don't think we should continue this discussion. I don't like this side of you.' 'I'm not a box,' she said 'I don't have sides. This is it. One side fits all. This is it.

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

Human eyes are the sign language of the brain. If you watch them carefully, you can see the truth played out, raw and unguarded.

Men and women are like two feet; they can help each other get ahead.

The only thing worse than being hurt is everyone knowing that you're hurt.

We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press...It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.

What doesn't kill men makes them stronger. What doesn't kill women makes men breakfast.

I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.

The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.

Sometimes, the hardest foster children to take are teenage boys, which I was one, and I was never adopted or anything, and so I think if people up more for teenage boys, that might be beneficial.

No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.

I had made what I believe was one of the more valuable decisions of my business life. This was to confine all efforts solely to making major gains in the long-run.

The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.

Mickey is a secret journal chained closed with a padlock, slammed inside a vault and dropped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

All such men are, or ought to be, agreed, that simple governments are despotisms; and of all despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent.

Until adolescence I thought I had the best mother in the world. Such a graceful mother. I had this fantasy that I was the wrong daughter.

Nobody wants to read about a good-looking happy person.

Here's what I've learned: that someone can change the course of history with a box cutter.

In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It was a land of plenty.

The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

Women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable.

Nobody gets out of love alive. You turn into a menace or a pest when you've been rejected.

The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

I'm definitely attracted to other Australians; I have a laid-back attitude to life that I feel is very Australian; I love a good barbie.

I'll never be known for my work with boundaries.

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.

Romantic love is not an emotion. ... It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.

Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly.

Saliva has testosterone and estrogen. When you kiss, you're having a chemical experience.

What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

My mother's career was over at 40 but she was still trying to be everyone's buddy, always smiling for the cameras.

As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

My father just got out of the Betty Ford Clinic. He's in his 60s, and this was the first time he ever did anything like that.