The toughest part of being on a diet is shutting up about it.
If a fly gets into the throat of one who is fasting, it is not necessary to pull it out.
If one doesn’t have a character like Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc, a diet simply disintegrates into eating exactly what you want to eat, but with a bad conscience.
Eating is never so simple as hunger.
Addiction, obesity, and starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons . . . over the control of the individual’s body.
You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.
Women should try to increase their size rather than decrease it, because I believe the bigger we are, the more space we’ll take up, and the more we’ll have to be reckoned with. I think every woman should be fat like me.
Jack Sprat could eat no fat, / His wife could eat no lean. / A real sweet pair of neurotics.
A monk asked Chao-chou, “I have just entered the monastery: please give me some guidance.” Chao-chou said, “Have you eaten your rice gruel?” The monk said, “Yes, I’ve eaten.” Chao-chou said, “Then go wash your bowl.”
Man does not live by bread alone.
Man does not live by bread alone, but he also does not live long without it.
No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.
A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself. . . . But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.
In the last twenty-four hours about forty thousand children, most of them under five, have died in the world. More than 80 per cent of those deaths are from preventable diseases like tetanus, measles, whooping cough, acute respiratory infection, and diarrhea. Such deaths are often associated with malnutrition.
In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat their own wives and children. We only devour widows’ houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor’s labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.
Greed is all right. . . . Greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that is often perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. . . . In the eyes of the people there is the failure, and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
The hunger of one is the shame of all.
