I think she ate a salad and some soup.
And loneliness.
She ate that, too.

I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.

She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.

To be loved to madness — such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn't feel so miserable.

And her joy was nearly like sorrow.

She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.

'But I get so hungry,' she said. 'Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?'
'When you love somebody.'

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together.

She wanted — what some people want throughout life — a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.

the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.

She heard hearts bounce, tears brewing, and breath going backward, but nobody said a word. By the sorrow and loss and sweetness in their faces she knew that they recognized her, and she accepted their hunger as her homage. She thought of the hunter's great-grandmother, and wondered what it must be like to grow old, and to cry.