A Certain Hunger

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

It’s better to live with guilt and remorse than it is to die—just look at how many of us cheat on our partners, our taxes, our diets, our dissertations. And that’s not even with our backs pressed cold against a dead glacier wall. It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite

“It feels like the last decade was a dream.” He nosed closer to my heart.

He needed to die.

Once the affection is gone, I always have a hard time recollecting it; it comes to me in phantasmagoric slivers in the quicksilver small hours of the night. Once the affection is gone, it slips from my memory like the face of a dead relative

Emotional attachment is for children, and sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again.

Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of people you love.

there was no immediate reason to rush anything.

In the end, I chose to do nothing with what I knew

Divided by what they chose to eat, these people are united by the fact that they committed crimes that caused the State to kill them. What drives killers to kill is a very personal question. We like to think that men kill because they’re men—it’s as indiscriminate as their wont to procreate. The quarterbacks in the high school of life, men are given a wide berth for murder, as they are for most things. Women, on the other hand, kill for only two reasons, or so the people w

(Side note: cazzo is Italian for “cock,” but it really means so much more than that. It’s a word that’s larger on the inside than its five letters would lead you to believe. Cazzo carries a fine, long, winding caravan of epithetic meanings: cock, dick, prick, shit, penis, pecker, and fuck. For example, you might in exasperation exclaim, “Che cazzo stai dicendo?” Which, literally translated, means, “What the cock are you saying?” but more meaningfully translates to “What the fuck are you saying?” However, if you’re a woman talking to your girlfriend, she might ask of your new lover, “Ha un bel cazzo?” an inquiry regarding the fitness of your new lover’s genitals. Cazzo is an elastic word, one whose growth verges on tumescence.)