M.F.K. Fisher Quotes

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.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

I'm sure that my mom would have been happy with any path I chose.

The main characteristics of effective leadership are intelligence, integrity or loyalty, mystique, humor, discipline, courage, self sufficieny and confidence.

The reason you take antidepressants is to feel calm. And romantic love is not calm -it's elation, it's mood swings, and you're killing all that when you take the drug.

Saying you're an alcoholic and an addict is like saying you're from Los Angeles and from California.

Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.

Research shows that couples who have a lot of similarities, including intellectual compatibility, end up staying together.

You're not famous until you're a Pez dispenser.

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

The Milkoviches are a much more extreme, much darker version of what the Gallaghers could be. The Gallaghers don't have a violent, sexually abusive, bigoted gangster for a father.

Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

Mistakes are a drag, because you get in the area of regret and self-pity.

I think your heart dances to the beat of your own drum, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.

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.

We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you'll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves.

Young women today do not marry the men they met in high school, or even the one they go out with at college, because they do not need to.

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

Psychologists maintain that the dizzy feeling of intense romantic love lasts only about 18 months to-at best-three years

I like pain. I like when it lingers. It reminds a person of what they've lived through.

Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time.

The so-called co-efficient of heritability, which I regard as one of those unfortunate short-cuts, which have often emerged in biometry for lack of a more thorough analysis of the data.

The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.

I didn't eat pork either. Except bacon, of course. Everyone eats bacon.

For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright.

When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

I mean, most fun things are bad for you in one way or another.

You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.

You know how they say that religion is the opiate of the masses? Well I took masses of opiates religiously.

I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital.

I think of my body as a side effect of my mind.

Sometimes I think all I want to find is a mean guy and make him be nice to me. Or maybe a nice guy who's a little bit mean to me. But they're usually too nice too soon or too mean too long.

We're apt to fall in love with those who are mysterious and challenging to us.

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.

It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things.

Everything grows rounder and wider and weirder, and I sit here in the middle of it all and wonder who in the world you will turn out to be.

This is perhaps the most important book on evolutionary genetics ever written

Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction.

One is a choice, and one is not.

Running for office is the least aerobic of the socially interactive sports.

Then I overdosed at 28, at which point I began to accept the bipolar diagnosis.

You'll be surprised what someone is able to handle given no other choice.

Walls have ears. Doors have eyes. Trees have voices. Beasts tell lies. Beware the rain. Beware the snow. Beware the man You think you know. -Songs of Sapphique

My mom had the breakdown for the family, and I went into therapy for all of us.