Wit & Attitude Quote by Minna Antrim

Antrim’s line lands like a genteel slap: you don’t get to wolf down thrills and then act shocked when your conscience has a stomachache. The verb choice is doing the heavy lifting. “Bolts” turns pleasure into something gulped, unchewed, grabbed in haste and appetite rather than savored with any awareness. It’s not pleasure she’s indicting so much as the unreflective way people consume it, treating desire as an emergency.

Then she twists the knife with “moral indigestion,” a prim, almost medical metaphor that makes guilt sound less like tragedy and more like a predictable bodily consequence. That’s the point: the complaint is performative. The “fool” wants the payoff without the aftertaste, wants to be absolved without admitting agency. Antrim is mocking the familiar routine of self-exoneration: “I couldn’t help myself,” followed by “how unfair that I feel bad.”

The subtext is social as much as personal. In a culture that loves both indulgence and virtue-signaling, moral nausea becomes a kind of status symbol: proof you’re still “good” even while doing what you wanted. Antrim refuses that bargain. She implies that ethics isn’t an alarm that goes off after the fact; it’s the chewing. Pay attention while you choose, or don’t act surprised when your body (or reputation) keeps the receipt.

As a writer of epigrams, Antrim compresses a whole theory of accountability into one digestive joke: appetite is human; pretending your appetite happened to you is the real stupidity.