On seeing another person, as if for the first time:
Fitzgerald: “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”

Polizzi: “He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs. She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face.”

On anger:
Hemingway: “His rage began to thin as he exaggerated more and more and spread his scorn and contempt so widely and unjustly that he could no longer believe in it himself.”

Polizzi: “Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a ‘roid rage, it is a ‘road’ ‘roid rage.”

On love:
Steinbeck: “Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”

Polizzi: “Yum. Johnny Hulk tasted like fresh gorilla.”

On the significance of place:
Didion: “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”

Polizzi: “Gia had never before been in jail. It wasn’t nearly as gritty and disgusting as she’d seen on TV prison shows. The Seaside Heights drunk tank — on a weekday afternoon — was as clean and quiet as a church.”

On the evil that lurks inside:
Faulkner: “There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it’s gone now and I’m sick”

Polizzi: “Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.”

and then i died