do you happen to have any quotes about gluttony and/or devouring? thank you!!
Last year I abstained
this year I devour
without guilt
which is also an art
—Margaret Atwood, Circe/Mud Poems
“We aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten. / Come, pretty girl. Let us devour our lives.”
—Natalie Diaz, “Soiree Fantastique”
"O God, that I were a man!
I would eat his heart in the marketplace!”
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
“What is it in me would
devour the world to utter it?
What is it in me will not let
the world be, would eat
not just this fish,
but the one who killed it,
the butcher who cleaned it […]
I would eat it all to utter it.”
— Li-Young Lee, “The Cleaving”
“There’s a YouTube video I’m fond of that shows a baby named Madison being given cake for the first time. The maniacal shine in her eyes when she first tastes chocolate icing is transcendent, a combination of “where has this been all my life” and “how dare you keep this from me?” Jaw still dropped in shock, she slowly tips the cake up towards her face and plunges in mouth-first. Periodically, as she comes up for air, she shoots the camera a look that is almost anguished. Can you believe this exists? her face says. Why can’t I get it all in my mouth at once?”
— Jess Zimmerman, “Hunger Makes Me”
“Hungry for the kill, but this hunger, it isn't you
Voices disappear when you are speaking in somber tunes
I will be the wolf and when you're starving, you'll need it too
Hungry for the kill, but this hunger, it isn't you”
— Monsters of Men, “Hunger”
“In the end the heart turns on itself / like hunger to a spoon.”
— Silvia Curbelo, “Tonight I Can Almost Hear the Singing”
Tell me it was for the hunger / & nothing less. For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep.”
— Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”
“Because desire won’t shrug off,
and the heart begins to eat its stores
its substance—slowly, at first, and
sparingly—
(but nothing’s left to lose so it is downed)
We have a thing here called hunger
A feeling and an ache, want of want.
You could try it sometime if you like.”
— Hannah Sanghee Park, “[Because desire won’t shrug off]”
“If the story begins with the lack of a child, then hunger becomes central. Food often replaces sex in folktales, and witches with some rule-bound delicacy are the fertility specialists of choice, second only to daring the fairies to give you a baby hedgehog, a snow-child, or an infant the size of your thumb. The trouble starts when a childless queen is given specific instructions– eat the white rose for a boy or the red rose for a girl, but not both. Eat the fair flower and not the bitter, black one. Peel both onions before you eat them. Folklorists would group all of these motifs under the number “T511– conception from eating,” with increasingly specific Dewey-Decimal-style numbers for conception from a flower or a fish, from swallowing a pearl or a peppercorn. Inevitably, the queen fails the interdiction, because she forgets the warning, or because the first thing she eats is so delicious she just can’t help it. Without that failure, there would be no story. Interdiction, violation: a rule is broken and the world is changed.”
—Kristiana Willsey, “Hunger is the Beginning of every Folktale”
“I saw him open his mouth wide...As though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“She had wanted to eat the whole fruit.
Knowing there would be hell to pay upstairs,
he stopped her. Heartsick, she refuses
to look at him – seven pomegranate seeds clutched
in her hand and the always ravenous hunger.”
— Mary Jo Bang, “Persephone Leaving”
“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”
— Anne Carson, “To Compostela”, Plainwater
“Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings. We do not need food: in many ways, we are food, trainable meat, lambs queueing up to buy mint sauce. We consume only what we are told to, from lipstick to life insurance, and only what will make us more consumable ourselves, the better to be chewed up and swallowed by a machine that wants our work, our money, our sexuality broken down into bite-sized chunks.”
— Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things
“The rain knows I am full of ghosts. / Take my hair out of its fraying knot. / Give me this hunger and nothing else.”
— Ana Carrizo, “Full of Ghosts”
“It’s a mean thing to be alive
And it’s a mean thing God did
To make us
To make us hunger.”
— Nick Narbutas, “The Language of the World”
“I will wait until the end of all things, and I will eat the sun and I will eat the moon.”
— Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology
“I have never known peace like the damp grass that yields to me / I have never known hunger like these insects that feast on me”
[Verse 1]
At seventeen I started to starve myself
I thought that love was a kind of emptiness
And at least I understood then the hunger I felt
And I didn't have to call it loneliness
[Chorus]
We all have a hunger
We all have a hunger
We all have a hunger
We all have a hunger”
— Florence and the Machine, “Hunger”
“I am starved for stimulation. I am so hungry I could eat a moon.”
— Sarah Jean Grimm, “Regarding Pilgrims”
“Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.”
— Angela Carter, “The Erl-King”
“In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
— Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”
“After two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down / while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift / she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton goes
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that.. is selflessness”
— Jared Singer, “An Entomologist’s Last Love Letter”
“Once, I asked for your favourite feeling. You said hunger.”
— Mary Szybist, “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary”
dededos
snowghoul
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
