A Certain Hunger Quotes
"Talking to Andrew, I discovered that my assistant, while only marginally adept at her job, was spectacularly good at being the kind of woman who makes otherwise intelligent men lose their absolute shit."
"I suspect what makes these women irresistible is this: the women who impassion men are those who can maintain that tension between being not in love and succumbing to it."
"Starvation is the most easily understood reason for cannibalism."
"You eat a person because the flesh holds a secret meaning, and to eat it is the straightest line between the abstract and the embodiment."
"Eat your dead companion, and you live on with the knowledge."
"We as an English-speaking people can't not eat our dead—our language loves a cannibal."
"Cannibalism is so deeply ingrained in our culture that a good portion of us engage in the sacred act once a week."
"To express our appreciation for a baby's cuteness, we say we could eat her up."
"When we have sex, we ravish our lovers, nibble their ears, lick their vulvas, or swallow their cocks."
"I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche."
"A mass murderer is blind to attachment; a serial killer, however, holds a close relationship with his or her victims."
"What separates the food critic from the dilettante diner is not merely a superior palate."
"If you're able to wed the fleshy and the linguistic, you have the makings of a great critic of food."
"Sometimes—rarely—you stumble into sheer perfection. Sometimes, meals are transcendent."
"The ethics of bloggers being paid to write about the wonders of a specific Dutch oven is no different from magazines offering glossy four-color consumer porn of items from companies that pay for advertising."
"I like a man who can keep his commitments to me."
"Nature had conspired to give us a beautiful day, Gil had used his skill to give us a beautiful sail, and I had made a beautiful meal."
"Prisoners love self-help books. They glom on to religious narratives as drowning rats to the flotsam of a sinking ship."
"I learned that a beef farmer’s life revolves around two things: food and shit."
"I acted like a bully with Gil, but then he always liked it when I took the upper hand."
"Everyone in food seemed to know everyone else; it was one long human centipede of fuckwittery."
"It’s a fascist adage: 'Say what you like about Mussolini, but at least the trains run on time.'"
"In the real world, I’d be comfortable, but in prison terms, I’m unimaginably rich."
"It’s a mitzvah," Marco said of his trade, "The shochet pays respect to the animal. He releases its deepest unconscious wish—to be our food, with grace, with respect, with humility."
"Choices are, after all, the things that haunt us."
"You only want what you can’t consistently have."
"There’s no good way to turn animals into meat."
"In confronting face to face the animal as we kill it, we assume the moral responsibility for taking the animal’s life."
"For us it may be ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but for cattle it’s so much more kaleidoscopic."
"You’d think nothing of picking up a boning knife to prise out a bit of peach pit lodged in the fruit’s tender flesh."
"I miss cracking spines to see myself splayed open in wet, glossy spreads of luscious, expansive prose."
"Every decade, every year, and sometimes every month, I see my money, my life, and my work devalued."
"Maybe I just want to see you, Emma. Ensure you’re eating at least one meal this week that was cooked by a caring hand."
"I never gained a ‘taste’ for murder. I might have gained an appreciation for human flesh, but I’ve always had a wide-ranging, experimental palate."
"To be honest—and, really, when have I been anything but—I’m not sure I know, not even now."
"Haters gonna hate, and predators are going to predate."
"Being on trial is remarkably draining, unendurably lonely, and terrifically public. I can’t say I cared for it."
"Men may come and men may go, but in American culture, at least, a girl’s bosom buddy will always be another woman."
"All humans are bad. Most of us merely live our lives with our worst, most unethical acts lying like bodies clad in concrete, undiscovered, quiet, and dark."
"Love can't simultaneously be an accident and a premeditated act, yet we treat it as if it is."
"I imagined being the me who I became when I was with Alex, this kinder, softer, gentler, thousand glimmering shafts of conscience-ridden self."
"You cannot have erotic love without the rank grittiness of dirty bodies, and bodies, like desires, are disgusting."
"I saw time passing, us growing old together... I imagined a life where I would always, ever, be Alex-me because to be the calculating, howling void I was before I met Alex was not an option."
"Every component in the Baked Alaska acted like a third wheel, a presence without a function."