So Big by Edna Ferber

"They're nice," she said, "but they don't have much fun. [...] They're professional amateurs, trying to express something they don't feel; or that they don't feel strongly enough to make it worth while expressing." (240)

"He tore at the smooth wall of her indifference, though he only cut and bruised his own hands in doing it." (242)

(1924. New York: Perennial, 2000)

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read

"It would have been possible now to avoid eating such things as rotten lungs and putrid intestines of bodies they had cut up weeks before but half the boys continued to do so because they had come to need the stronger taste. It had taken a supreme effort of will for these boys to eat human flesh at all, but once they had started and persevered, appetite had come with the eating, for the instinct to survive was a harsh tyrant which demanded not just that they eat their companions, but that they get used to doing so." (214)

(New York: Avon Books, 1975)