Claire Messud Quotes

I'm a fan of leaving people hungry; I don't like leaving people satisfied.

Denial of one appetite sharpens the others.

Wasted is when you have a hankering for ice cream.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

Where desire ends up causing suffering is when it fixates.

The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.

Pleasure once tasted satisfies less than the desire experienced for its torments.

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

Not everything you wanted, deep inside, worked out.

A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.

I'd forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startle birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Everyone wanted what she couldn't have.

Everybody's got a hungry heart.

Restriction generates yearning. You want what you cannot have.

I don't s'pose anybody on earth likes gingerbread better'n I do-and gets less'n I do.

... privation is the source of appetite.

All I see is people out there who are hungry for more.

Nothing feeds a hunger like a thirst

They say "ya gotta stay hungry"... Hey Baby...I'm just about starvin' tonight!