“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”
―
Chelsea G. Summers,
A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman's love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and foot-ball. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing... It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly and we all did. Some more than others.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“I read, I wrote, I learned, and I fucked—it was a classic liberal arts education.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“You can't be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Judges and juries are notoriously brutal on violent female offenders, a category to which I belong without question. Nature abhors a vacuum; jurisprudence hates a violent woman. We can forgive any number of men murdering their wives and girlfriends. But we have a hard time extending the same compassion to women who kill their husbands and boyfriends, even though women have many more reasons to be driven to it. Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother's love, a father's love, a lover's love, a friend's love, an enemy's love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-pushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love is overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It's an unreadable mess.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“We as an English-speaking people can't not eat our dead— our language loves a cannibal. We don't just win at sports, we kill the other team; we demolish them; we devour our opponents. To express a baby's cuteness, we say we could eat her up.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman's love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and foot-ball. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing... It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly and we all did. Some more than others.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“I read, I wrote, I learned, and I fucked—it was a classic liberal arts education.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“You can't be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“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.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Judges and juries are notoriously brutal on violent female offenders, a category to which I belong without question. Nature abhors a vacuum; jurisprudence hates a violent woman. We can forgive any number of men murdering their wives and girlfriends. But we have a hard time extending the same compassion to women who kill their husbands and boyfriends, even though women have many more reasons to be driven to it. Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother's love, a father's love, a lover's love, a friend's love, an enemy's love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-pushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love is overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It's an unreadable mess.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“We as an English-speaking people can't not eat our dead— our language loves a cannibal. We don't just win at sports, we kill the other team; we demolish them; we devour our opponents. To express a baby's cuteness, we say we could eat her up.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
“Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.” ― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
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