...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of fully engaging with life rather than emotionally detaching from it.
M. F. K. Fisher expresses a profound appreciation for life and encourages embracing experiences rather than distancing oneself from them. The idea is that life is finite and should not be spent in a state of detachment, suggesting that to truly live, one must engage deeply with their emotions and surroundings.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing life's challenges.
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 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...
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.
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
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.
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.
No Difference Small as a peanut, Big as a giant, We're all the same size When we turn off the light. Rich as a sultan, Poor as a mite, We're all worth the same When we turn off the light. Red, black or orange, Yellow or white, We all look the same When we turn off the light. So maybe the way, To make everything right Is for god to just reach out And turn off the light!
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.
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