M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

The heart is like a flower. Unless it is open, it cannot release its fragrance into the world.

I don't know whether it's a fear of standing up, but I really love sitting at the table and blabbing. I learn so much that way, and I think I get free that way, free from inhibition and fears.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

Aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards.

People reach an age... where somebody else's platform is no longer yours.

You know when I was 20 and 30, they were insecurities. Now they're just a new normal. I'm 60 years old, so my expectations of who I am and how I look and how I show up in the world had to shift. Not because I couldn't help it, or not because I did anything wrong, but because I had to get into the natural flow of my being as a woman.

Dating and getting attention from boys was something that came later to me.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

I think you sort of shed skins as you go along in life. You get into your 40s, and you feel like, 'OK, no more pretending.' You get to just be who you are.

When you're in your 20s, you're a little more carefree; you're single. You have a very different way of looking at the world and experiencing the world. But later in your 30s, when you have children, a career, career obstacles, mortgages, car payments and relationships, you have to negotiate; that's a very different life.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.

I would be in a room full of people being loud and running around, and I'd be in the corner just playing with the wall. So I was very, very quiet, but when I really got into the arts, that opened me up.

I usually say I left puberty at 58.

The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.

We always trained never to really talk about things and get it off our chests but I think now everybody is more open about it.

I think you feel more liberated in a foreign country. You're more open. You understand less about the social constructs that exist in a certain place, so you take people more at face value, and you're also taken more at face value, which makes you more able to be yourself.

I looked at myself and realized I had a lot of boundaries up about what I would talk about, what was private for me and what wasn't. I decided to just get rid of them. It was quite liberating.

I feel like I've lived two or three completely different lives. At 33, I'm quite reflective and have the perspective you get in your old age when you have been through the losses of life.

Basically, I think some of the weight helped take some of the walls down in reality, so basically I got a little more confident. I'm definitely not super confident, but I am confident that I don't have to hide behind those layers of fat and that I can actually open up to people a little more.

When I was younger I didn't want to hang around with anyone. But now I feel so comfortable. I convey my thoughts, my emotions, I can communicate better, I have a better understanding of the world. Now I have a sense of purpose. It makes me think a lot more about things.

'Blackheart' was the moment for me to really open up and let people into the world that is me.

Dance as if this is the last dance. Dance with abandon, holding nothing back. That will bring transformation to your being, and a possibility of transformation for other people too.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.