“Eat or die, the saying goes, but to my ears it sounded like just one more unpleasant threat. Nevertheless this superstition (I could only think of it as such) always aroused doubt and fear in me. Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, ‘Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.’”

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human