Home > Author > Chelsea G. Summers
1 " Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. "
― Chelsea G. Summers , A Certain Hunger
2 " I always marvel at this sort of woman, the sort who accepts total, monogamous devotion like it's her birthright. To my experience, there's nothing that unites these women - they can be smart as pinstripes or dumb as fake fur, they can have classic beauty of a perfectly ripe Honeycrisp apple or the compelling plainness of pie. They tend to be skinny: perhaps their performance of appetite suggests comfort with deprivation. Maybe they dupe men into thinking that they, like air plants, don't need nourishment to survive. I suspect what makes these women irresistible is this: the women who impassion men are those who can maintain that tension between being in love and succumbing to it. "
3 " The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. Everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don’t feel an unendurable level of shame. "
4 " I tolerate humanity's crush in order to be allowed to write. I behave beautifully so that I have paper, pens, and occasional access to a computer. I suffer for my art. "
5 " This man, this Casimir, which is the name of the young man in question - and it should have told me something, a dirty translation of it means "destroyer of peace" - was nothing to me, a single blip in the Morse code of my life, something too brief to read. He was a phoneme, a dangling modifier, a printer's orphan. "
6 " We fell wildly, passionately in love for a number of weeks, and then, in a snap, it was gone - for me, at least. "
7 " It's one small mercy that here in prison we don't see anyone we don't choose to see. In this way, prison is beautifully unlike real life. In real life, people from your past litter your life like cockroaches, popping out of crevices and scuttling across the dark. "
8 " I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit. "
9 " Eat what you love,' they say, and I have. But that's facile. It's not merely that I loved Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco; it's also that I lost them. And it's not merely that I loved and lost them; it's also that I hated them. As much as they were my lovers, they were my enemies, which is more or less all you can hope for from a person with whom you do not share DNA. "
10 " They were the people I modeled myself after because fitting in was easier than sticking out. I wore what they wore, I watched what they watched. I listened to the music they liked, and I screamed at musicians' names because these girls screamed first. "
11 " I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalistic as a Big Mac. It's not important that it's real. It's only important that it's tasty. "
12 " Unlike most other language — which is stored in cerebral cortex, the brain’s center for higher learning — curse words are stored in the limbic system, our most basic, lizard brain level. "
― Chelsea G. Summers
13 " Female psychopaths, researchers eventually realized, don't present like the males. To which I respond: No shit. We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood - or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It's not that women psychopaths don't exist; it's that we fake it better than men. "
14 " If you're in wine country, find out where the winemakers eat and go there. "
15 " Like prison, I'm never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy - because here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person. "
16 " You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway "
17 " We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice. "
18 " I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn't know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power - and I wanted power even then. "
19 " Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk. "
20 " What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery "
