19 Quotes by Chelsea G. Summers

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

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.

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.

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.

Afterwards I felt a keen buzz, like the susurration of a crush. But I also felt intensely anxious, taut and tight with the realization of what I had done. It wasn't guilt, not really, not as I fumble to understand what 'guilt' means. It was more the pervasive fear that I'd be found out - or possibly the fear that I wouldn't.

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.

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.

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

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.