Although she would sooner have given up thinking than eating, she resented being pushed into depriving herself of either.

Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.

What he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.

I think cooking completes you as a woman. … I woke up one morning and said, I can't do this [eating meat] to myself anymore. I didn't feel good. I was constipated all the time. … I used to live to eat. Now I eat to live.

Many a young fellow has found himself in a similar predicament, but I doubt whether anyone ever became so desperately hungry as I did on that day. I recollect that, having rashly eaten up my sausage before eight o'clock, I felt a sinking towards twelve; it was aggravated by the savoury smell of roast meat which steamed from the cookshops and dining-rooms as I walked along the streets. About one o'clock I gazed with malignant envy on the happy clerks who could go in and order platefuls of the roast and boiled which smoked in the windows, and threw a perfume more delicious than the sweetest strains of music into the streets where I lingered and looked. And at two I observed the diners come out again, walking more slowly, but with an upright and satisfied air, while I -- the sinking had been succeeded by a dull gnawing pain -- was slowly doubling up. At half-past two I felt as if I could bear it no longer. I had been walking about, trying different offices for a clerkship. I might as well have asked for a partnership. But I could walk no more.

One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become.

I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

"There's a capacity for apetite," Samuel said, "that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy"

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy

I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets. I tried the Scarsdale diet and the Stillman water diet (you remember that one, where you run weight off trying to get to the bathroom). I tried Optifast, Juicefast, and Waterfast. I even took those shots that I think were made from cow pee. I endured every form of torture anybody with a white coat and a clipboard could devise for a girl who really liked fried pork chops.
One night while I was on some kind of liquid-protein diet made from bone marrow, or something equally appetizing, I was with a group of friends at a Howard Johnson’s and some of them were having fried clams. I’ll never forget sitting there with all of that glorious fried fat filling my nostrils and feeling completely left out. I went home and wrote one of my biggest hits, “Two Doors Down.” I also went off my diet and had some fried clams.
There were times when I thought of chucking it all in. “Damn the movie,” I would say. “I’m just gonna eat everything and go ahead and weigh five hundred pounds and have to be buried in a piano case.” Luckily, a few doughnuts later, that thought would pass and I would be back to the goal at hand. I remember something in a book I read called Gentle Eating. The author said you should pretend the angels are eating with you and that you want to save some for them. I loved that idea, because I love angels. I have to admit, though, there were times I would slap those angels out of the way and have their part too. A true hog will do that.