Hungerstone Kat Dunn Quotes

To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

I do not need to contain my appetites. What is a monster but a creature of agency?

It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.

Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.

I want; it is a new and thrilling revelation. I can want, and it will not destroy me.

All we can hope for in life is to know one's own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.

I wonder for what you hunger and whether you allow yourself to feel it.

I learned quickly that my wants and needs were unwelcome, too great for any reasonable person to fulfill, and in time I came to agree with her. I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it.

I hated her because I did not understand what it was that I had lost before I saw it in her.

I furl myself in the quilt like an oyster in its shell with no pearl to show for the grit that works through it.

None of us deserve our bad fortune, but that does not stop it from coming.

This is the bargain I have struck. To lose my softness in exchange for survival.

I made a bargain in my youth, for safety, for survival, and it has all been for naught. I am not safe. I have never been safe. So why have I tried so hard to create it? All I have made is a prison. But perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose. I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.

I remember only the sense that the whole world passed before me, and yet I belonged nowhere in it.

I wanted to be near her light. Even though she cast me in its shadow.

If the world offers me no kindness, then I will take from it armor and sword, create an unassailable fortress for myself, and lock the door.

A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?

Before, I stood on the banister of the balcony above the dining hall and thought the solution to the burden of myself was to end it all. How foolish that seems now. How futile. I could go, and no one would care. How much better to make them all regret knowing me.

She gives such insults generously. As if her opinion is a gift.

I am good for nothing but blood.

Since Carmilla, something vital in me has changed. She has found a crack within me and levered me apart.

If I give in to that impulse, the need to be seen, understood by another, then I do not know what howling wave of past pain may capsize me.

I will die like all mortal things. At least let me taste a little life before I go.

Oh, little Lenore. It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.

The more I understand my own appetite, the more I understand how far I am from satiating it. It is as though it spills out from me from every direction. I want to be desired, I want to travel, to paint, or write, to be listened to and respected, needed. I want true family, whether that be children or not. I want, I want, I want.

A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to stare ourselves, to kill out appetite until we embody a living death?

Men conspiring in dark little holes like vermin, chittering their spiteful thoughts to one another, make the world like this, hurt people like that. I hate them I hate them I hate them.

All we can hope for in life is to know one’s own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.

I am a woman woken from thirty years slumber, and I would eat the world should it satisfy this empty keening void where my heart should be. I would cry with grief over my life so unfulfilled, and drink down the salty tears, eat my worthless tongue and impotent fingers, skin this carcass and pick the bones clean.

The blood that came each month after. At first, a disappointment, then a fear, then a grief, then an inevitability. I was good for nothing but blood.

Who would I be if I was someone who wanted things?

What is a monster but a creature of agency?

I do not know how to begin to explain to her how risible it is for Henry to accuse me of working too hard when he is the one who has set my tasks.

I am a woman woken from thirty years slumber, and I would eat the world should it satisfy this empty, keening void where my heart should be. I would cry with grief over my life so unfulfilled and drink down the salty tears, eat my worthless tongue and impotent fingers, skin this carcass and pick the bones clean. Oh God. There is something wrong with me. I am so, so hungry.

My body bucks and breaks beneath my hand; it is its own animal, with its own limits, that I have not cared to mind. It betrays me with its wants and needs, its pains and limitations, and I am furious to be tethered in this way. I thought us prisoners together, but perhaps we are enemies, working tirelessly to move in opposite directions.

If Cora is an English rose, I am milk thistle: a weed, persistent and desperate.

I am a woman woken from thirty years slumber, and I would eat the world should it satisfy this empty, keening void where my heart should be. I would cry with grief over my life so unfulfilled, and drink down the salty tears, eat my worthless tongue and impotent fingers, skin this carcass and pick the bones clean.

It is a melody to me. You are a song, Lenore, harmony and discord. I am learning to sing it.

I am a woman woken from thirty years slumber, and I would eat the world should it satisfy this empty, keening void where my heart should be.

Let this life of mine be about more than pain.

It is a better pain. A more familiar one. One I control. In this place I know who I am, and all my suffering is mastered.

I am a drowning woman clinging to a wreckage, but I will sing so loud as I go down.

I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.

What a strange, cruel gift she has given me: to truly know myself, to know pleasure, to know freedom - and to wake and find myself in Hell.

I realize I am about to cry, because it is all entirely true, and the betrayal has opened a wound in me I think could split me in half. "I'm sorry," says Cora, cowed. Her face is a crumpled flower, and I meet it with guilt. "Never mind," I say. She wants me to console her, and I would, but I feel spread so thin that there is nothing in me left to give. Who will console me? Who thinks of how I feel?

I am not made for this, but Cora is. She skips lightly from stone to stone, vivacious and bright and so unencumbered. Jealousy is not an emotion I have easily tolerated in myself before, but it spills out now, raw and vicious, a blade turned against my own heart. I am jealous of Cora's passion and carelessness, but most of all I am jealous that she can experience all these things at an age when I held myself under such rigid control, when I was a creature made only from fear and survival. I am jealous that anybody has the gift of growing up differently.

I want, I lack, I hunger.

How frightening it would be to die, but how great a relief to sleep forever.

Better to know what I am faced with than fear it's specter.

You think yourself a tool, needed only when useful. You are wrong.

I knew then that I could die, and no one would care. There was only me to care about myself. So I would not let my mortal body die; I would keep it alive and propel it forward by the only means possible. Instead, to survive, I must die inside; I must shut down every sense of self, every dream, every weakness. I killed hope, to live. Now I must find a way to live again. Even if it means I must kill.

I have made so many mistakes. I grieve so deeply for myself.

It is over. Whatever scaffolding I have constructed to hold my life up cannot disguise that I lie in ruins.

Carmilla holds an allure, like ghosting a finger around the edge of a flame: the temptation, the beauty, and the anticipation of pain.