Having had such a yearning for as long as I can remember, I was surprised by recognition in seeing it articulated, here presented as a form of hunger. I wasn’t born in a ghetto, but did feel constraints in scope which I needed to scramble away from.

‘If you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward and thus to hunger for the universal.’

For descriptions of other forms of hunger, more physiological, see quotations by Nikos Kazantzakis, Vasily Grossman, and Henry Williamson.

Source: Saul Bellow to Martin Amis, quoted in 1843  – apologies for having torn the page out without the precise reference, a lapse in my habitually methodical, archival approach.

Photo credit: Kenrick Mills at unsplash.com