Margaret Atwood Quotes

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

A more shocking scene cannot be imagined, than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, eating out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father - the mother that of her children - children that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors, added to the horror of the scene. Language cannot describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of these wretched and pitiable beings. Those who but one month before would have shuddered and sickened at the thought of eating human flesh, or of killing their companions and relatives to preserve their own lives, now looked upon the opportunity by these acts afforded them of escaping the most dreadful of deaths …

Hunger can bring out the worst in us.

You eat anything when you need energy to survive and there's nothing in your body, when you are becoming just bones and tissues and muscles and I don't wish those circumstances on anybody.

And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?

A hungry stomach cannot hear.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

What would it take for me to eat human flesh? If that was the only way to stay alive, I would. I would eat anything.

People ate all their beasts of burden, and the Caliph had only three horses left. Next they set on their dogs and cats. Finally…people began to eat human flesh…Men stood on their terraces and caught passersby using hooks on the end of ropes.

Hunger is the teacher of many.

Bread did not have its usual nourishing power and strength because the grain was not nourished by the warmth of summer sunshine. Hence those who ate it, even in large quantities, were hungry again after a little while. There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.... Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children....

No agitation for political reforms could be carried on by a plague-stricken and starving people. Food was what they needed and most urgently demanded. The political argument died away, drowned in cries and petitions for relief, lost in weepings and wailings for the victims who were perishing in hundreds by the roadsides, in the fields, and in their bare and empty houses.

[Starving] women, children, the elderly, they don’t know anything about four-party talks. They want to eat. They want to live.

It is impossible to describe the suffering and misery on every side. The only food was a mixture of treebark, roots and clay.

Losing a game is not a tragedy after experiencing border raids and having to eat beetles because you are out of rations.

Hunger is never delicate.

Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does,you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.

The heat of the bread burned into my skin, but I clutched it tighter, clinging to life.

Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations.

Our chiefs are killed. . . . The little children are freezing to death. . . . My people have no blankets, no food. . . . My heart is sick and sad. . . . I will fight no more forever.

Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

A semi-starved nation can have neither religion nor art nor organization.

What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.