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.
Interpretation
Our basic needs are interconnected, making it difficult to separate them in thought and experience.
In this quote, M. F. K. Fisher expresses the profound interconnection between fundamental human needs such as food, security, and love. She illustrates how these needs are so deeply intertwined that discussing one invariably leads to reflections on the others, emphasizing that the experience of hunger goes beyond physical sustenance to encompass emotional and psychological nourishment as well. This insightful observation highlights the complexity of human needs and the holistic nature of fulfillment.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of community support, I might use this quote to illustrate how love and emotional connection are essential in addressing hunger.
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...
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.
...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
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.
The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
Unity consciousness is a state of enlightenment where we pierce the mask of illusion which creates separation and fragmentation. Behind the appearance of separation is one unified field of wholeness. Here the seer and the scenery are one.
The visible is always a mirror of the invisible. The reality is imagined before it manifests itself.
Unless you see yourself standing there with the shrieking crowd, full of hostility and hatred for the holy and innocent Lamb of God, you don’t really understand the nature and depth of your sin or the necessity of the cross.
Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse.
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
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