To Consume / On Consumption  

This page was on my previous website but it is such a special place to me. This is my place for my collection of quotes about the inherent intimacy of cannibalism and the violence in hunger and consumption.

A lot of this dwells in power-imbalances, loving someone so much you could eat them, as well as metaphor. I do believe it's completely normal to explore dark subject matter as long as it is not causing anyone, you or others, harm, mentally or physically. Generally, a lot of exposure can be bad for the mind, but it's fine to indulge once in a while.

“Food-hunger. Love-hunger. Faith-hunger. Soul-hunger. Who among us has not been hungry? Who among us has not been vulnerable? Who among us has not been a starving lion? Who among us has not been a prey animal? Who among us has not been a predator?”
— Sherman Alexie, 'Sonnet, with Pride'

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism”
— Georges Bataille, 'Erotism: Death and Sensuality'

"She devoured meat, imagining she was ingesting the flesh of the god of pleasure and pain, becoming one with him, divine. She drank wine, imagining it was that same god’s blood, the god of the beautiful and the cruel."
— Francesca Lia Block, 'Psyche in a Dress'

“The theme of love as eating and being eaten”
— Caroline Walker Bynum, 'Women mystics and eucharistic devotion in the thirteenth century'

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?"
— Anne Carson, 'Plainwater'

“'You have two choices. One: I eat you know. Or two: I will cut your arms and legs off one by one and eat them slowly.’
‘Why?’
‘For love.’”
— Cecelia Condit, 'Possibly in Michigan' (1983)

“I will eat the hand that feeds me just to stay alive.”
— cyberpunkist

“Intimacy as mutual eating”
— Donald Duclow, 'Hungers of Hadewijch and Eckharte'

"For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink."
— English Standard Bible 'John 6:55'

“For each kiss brings with it the beginnings of eating the other.”
— Jeremy Fernando, 'Les Amants'

"I'm dead flesh, ready to be eaten."
— finaltransgirl

“Others were cooking his legs… When I stepped into that cave … smell of meat cooking… I thanked the Lord.”
— Ted Griffin, 'Ravenous' (1999)

“I am in love with reciprocity. I eat you eat. I starve you starve. I hunt we live.”
— Dave Harris, 'Patricide'

“I want to be eaten alive. I want / to feel wanted.”
— Elisabeth Hewer, 'Wishing for Birds'

“Lick the blood from my hands and tell me you still love me.”
— horrorgorewhore

“I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”
— Han Kang, 'The Vegetarian'

“You still eat away at me, more and more, insatiably. I’m stupid, I let you do it. But you’re stupid, too. You don’t realize that by eating me you’re poisoning yourself,”
— Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, 'Rien ne va Plus'

“Love has teeth which bite, and wounds which never close.”
— Stephen King, 'The Body'

“The threat of being eaten faded, for humans, long ago. The deeply buried fear remains, however, surfacing periodically in tales of mutant piranhas, marauding sharks, and resurrected dinosaurs. Tales of cannibalism tap into the same fear – the prospect of being transformed from predator to prey, and from person to meat – but they add an extra frisson of horror. Beasts, we tell ourselves, act on instinct. They are hungry and we look like food to them. When fellow humans regard us as food, however, they do so thoughtfully, rationally, and with specific intent: They do not simply want to eat another human being, they want to eat ‘us’.”
— Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 'What’s Eating You?: Food and Horror on Screen'

"Margaret Atwood says, “if you get hungry enough (…) you start eating your own heart.” Mine ate me. What does that make of this hunger?"
— Grace Moloney, 'i’ll bite the hands that feed me'

“The kiss wants blood. The received image of the kiss is of a contact that brushes the skin, the lips, that touches the skin without breaking it and that, when it joins mouths, exchanges breath and saliva, but not blood.”
— Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Icon of Fury: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day'

“Don’t worry, son. It’s only flesh… and all flesh is grass”
— Vincenzo Natali, 'In The Tall Grass' (2019)

“I was born with violence in my bones and my teeth were the first to know it. As soon as they started pushing through my gums, I started biting.”
— Shilo Niziolek, 'HAUTNINGS: Porcelain Ghosts'

“I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.”
— Mary Oliver, 'Winter Hours'

“Men have used her meanly. She will eat them. Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.”
— Sylvia Plath, 'Three Women'

“A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.”
— Marie Rutkoski, 'The Winner’s Kiss'

"That I can be fully consumed by what loves me."
— Jonathan Sims, 'MAG 32: Hive' (2016)

“There’s nothing inherently special about us… Meat is meat.”
— Jonathan Sims, 'MAG 72: Takeaway' (2017)

“I don’t know how to stay tender with this much blood in my mouth”
— William Shakespeare, 'Hamlet', Act IV, Scene V

“Without lingering on his act, Hannibal sucks the lone DROP from his thumb-tip. The sound is not unlike a quick KISS.”
— Jennifer Schurr, 'Hannibal' 1.04 / 'œuf'

“Peel your heart like a pomegranate. Offer it to him, palms outwards. Say “eat.” Watch him come away stained red by you. You’re in his teeth. He’ll kiss you with that mouth.”
— Azra.T, 'Fruit'

"Dig your teeth into me. Come on, I dare you. Take a bite. Open me up: raw and candyfloss pink on the inside. Make it hurt. I figure, you’re going to hurt me one way or another. Might as well be with your mouth.”
— Ashe Vernon, 'It's a Circus and we all paid to be here'

“If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth.”
— Ocean Vuong, 'Immigrant Haibun'

‘He licked my blood off his fingers. He loves me, I thought. He completely and totally loves me.”
— Topaz Winters, 'Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing / But First the Stomach'

“Don’t feed it / My friend warns me / But my heart is just there / How can I stop the monster’s / Small mouth from opening / When it wants so much and I / Want to be needed”
— Angela Veronica Wong, 'On Weathering'

“I understand why people sometimes want to kill their lovers, eat their lovers, inhale the ashes of their dead lovers. I understand that this is the only way to possess another person with the kind of desperate longing that I have to take Rafe inside of me.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, 'Prozac Nation'