A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

One learns so much about a person when one merely wants to fuck him.

I have always found it hard to listen when a man pulls my head back by my hair. I should have listened. I should have known. I did neither.

I could not then imagine I’d ever have a lover who would not want to see me again. I still can’t.

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.

It’s amazing I didn’t turn out worse than I did.

There’s a lot to be said for intimidating intelligence and a dearth of conscience, and I possess both.

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

In real life, people from your past litter your life like cockroaches, popping out of crevices and scuttling across the dark.

but were they my friends? I don’t know. They were the people I modeled myself after because fitting in was easier than sticking out.

You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never know too much.

Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love.

From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.

The inescapable, imperceptible power of time reduces even mountains to molehills.

I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.

Believe others, if it makes you feel safe. Safety, too, is a lie.

Once the affection is gone, it slips from my memory like the face of a dead relative.

Kill one man and you’re an oddity. Kill a few and you’re a legend.

Humans are far more interested in themselves than they are in anyone else.

I respect men who teach me something new about myself. They fall so far and few between.

I like a man who can keep his commitments. Let me rephrase that: I like a man who can keep his commitments to me.

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

I was not happy at what my life had pushed me to do, but who is.

Choices must be made. In life as in writing, you kill your darlings. You kill, anyway, and then you see what you can take with you.

When I feel the need to break up with something, it’s simply dead to me.

Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.

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.

Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.

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

Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women.

My heart had become a home, and I did not live there alone.

I fell in love. I loved. I did not want to. I had not put myself in the path of love; I did not seek gravity. Love found me; gravity took me.

This is life at its most essential, a series of decisions that leads to your inexorable end and your desperate, muffled hope that you may be celebrated when it comes. I can live with my choices, as I will live with my legacy.