Top 40 Chelsea G. Summers Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

3. “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

4. “What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

5. “Don’t believe the lies. Don’t believe those lies, anyway. Believe others, if it makes you feel safe. Safety, too, is a lie.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

6. “You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

7. “Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

8. “One thing I’ve learned since college is that few men will suck your toes. Those who will are men of uncommon bravery, vision, and appetite. You don’t let them just wander off to eat street meat.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

9. “It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

10. “Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

14. “I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

15. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

16. “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

17. “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

18. “To this day, I can’t look at a Burger King cheeseburger wrapper without feeling my clit twitch.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

19. “It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

20. “The unapologetically guilty woman sleeps soundly at night.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

21. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

22. “Or as if killing were like potato chips; one leads to another in an endless orgy of mindless indulgence. Before you know it, the whole bag is gone, and you’re sitting there with gritty fingers, grease on your lips, and bathed in blood.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

28. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

29. “Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

30. “Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

31. “And then, my breath caught in reverence, I watched as his eyes grew blank with ethereal suddenness. It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

32. “My thinking has always been that if love, marriage, and family were intrinsically so meaningful, so exceptional, and so necessary, then we wouldn’t need millennia of propaganda selling them to us.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

33. “I like expensive men. They smell like money, confidence, and expensive hand lotion.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

34. “Just because I’m a psychopath doesn’t mean I’m incapable of learning and growing, or whatever.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

35. “Americans adore systems. We want a system that obscures the system so that we feel comforted by there being both a system and a conspiracy system behind the system.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

36. “What is importance, anyway, but the weight of experience.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

37. “Yet women weren’t always the angles of the house, and angels weren’t always benevolent... we like to forget that men imprisoned women in the house and expected gratitude in return.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

38. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

39. “We were like an old married couple, Andrew and I, companionable in long silences and happy to be in each other’s company. Except, of course, that he was dead and I had eaten him.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

40. “But I’ve always found that being the center of attention is an implicitly erotic state.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

41. “He was a luscious memory I held in my head. I could take his memory out of safekeeping and stroke it when I needed it.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

42. “We fell wildly, passionately in love for a number of weeks, and then, in a snap, it was gone – for me, at least.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

43. “You wake up with someone one too many mornings and you realize that any magic you’d seen was magic you’d made.”

— Chelsea G. Summers

44. “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.”

— Chelsea G. Summers