“I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to

“I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged - those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home - are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.”

— Andre Dubus, “After Twenty Years”

“The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.”

—

John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

“A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when [Simone Weil] heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“No, no, I do not feel sorry for those who die of hunger. What I feel is rage.”

—
Clarice Lispector, “Dies Irae”

“You and your friends fill your mouths with big words–Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution–and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people sat at the table.”

— José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion

“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia