old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.
M. F. K. FisherI can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.
M. F. K. FisherToo few of us, perhaps, feel that breaking of bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, mean more than satisfaction of a need. We make such primal things as casual as tunes heard over a radio, forgetting the mystery and strength in both.
M. F. K. FisherLife is hard, we say. An oyster's life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation.
M. F. K. FisherI 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 moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. 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