Цитаты из книг — Челси Саммерс

Парадокс в том, что одним из немногих моих прав как заключенной является право на медицинское обслуживание, с учётом того, что я здесь пожизненно. Так что, в отличие от вас, я получаю его в лучшем виде, причем за счёт ваших налогов. В богатстве и бедности, болезни и здравии, пока смерть не разлучит нас - пожизненное…

You never see as many innocent people as you do in prison. Everyone here is stuck in the limbo of their own appeal, buffeted in eternal circles with their arms wrapped around sheaves of legal paper. The bubble-wrap of self-delusion swaddles all convicts; they think they’re this close to being sprung free. Almost all are…

Даже неврологи признают, что как только речь заходит о человеческом мозге, они превращаются в Христофора Колумба: ищут новый маршрут в Азию, а открывают Америку

The choices that we have, the choices that we make—these choices condemn us, constrain us, and create us. 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.

There’s nothing like a group of felons for the swift detection of total bullshit. Our ability to sniff out mendacity is as keen as our abilities to lie to ourselves and, more important, to others.

I’d been writing about food. Everyone in food seemed to know everyone else; it was one long human centipede of fuckwittery, where not only was everyone suddenly a writer or a celebrity, but also chefs and sommeliers and even bloody butchers were stars, crossing oceans and running symposiums, Facebooking and tweeting and…

I loved him, I suppose, but it was the love of an itchy sweater that looks too good on you to throw it away. Every time you slip into that sweater, you know you’re going to get compliments and admiring glances, and every moment you’re alone, you’re going to scratch your flesh raw.

Alex was a man so good he was good enough for us both, and I don’t like good people. Good is round as a spoon. There’s no edge in good.

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. Your heart thumps because there’s…

I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason—things happen because we make them happen—but sometimes the mystic reaches its long fingers through the ether and taps us on the breastplate.

Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can’t recapture it and you don’t want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger’s heart.

Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love. Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen. My parents, I learned, were precisely this kind of symbiotic organism.

The goddess of femininity is cruel to mature women, crushing our brittle bones in her silken, youthful grip. As a girl, when you grow up, you become delectable. As a woman, when you grow old, you turn immaterial—unless you bear children, unless you make art, unless you leave a legacy.

All humans are bad. Most of us merely live our lives with our worst, most unethical acts lying like bodies clad in concrete, undiscovered, quiet, and dark. What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery.

There is, however, a lot of video because if there’s one thing that the people who love food love it’s watching; the internet has made peeping Toms of us all.

Choices are, after all, the things that haunt us. The moments when we could’ve turned left but turned right. The times when we could’ve gone back but forged ahead. The instants when we made decisions that we would live to regret.

Often, restaurant owners simply don’t care much about quality—the ego wants what the ego wants, as long as there’s enough money, coke, and young flesh in tight trousers or skirts—so restaurants will continue to operate on the sheer power of investor cash.