Michelle Tea Quotes

#1. To have someone know you so thoroughly and not want you. Is there anything more painful?

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#2. You are right where you should be / now act like it

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#3. She wouldn't have sex with me in public bathrooms. Little things like this haunted me. I was only twenty-five.

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#4. The girls Iris went through wound up cracked vases no longer fit for flowers, leaky dust collectors. After Iris, girls left town or started fucking boys. She ruined everyone.

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#5. The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you're happy is a sham. I didn't even want to be happy anymore because I'd rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I

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#6. This upscale Marin whorehouse allowed the men to come and pick from the lineup of women like we were donuts in a pastry case.

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#7. I had an awful time quitting jobs. It was so irresponsible, and being inherently irresponsible, I knew I had to be vigilant. So instead I would make them fire me. I have had girlfriends who employ this strategy in relationships, which is bad, but in regards to employment it is ok.

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#8. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.

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#9. They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they'd be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn't imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores.

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#10. It smelled of oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers.

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#11. You can't let the apocalypse rule your life.

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#12. I had played all my angles, tossed my heart with a wet rattling thump onto her snare drum, I Love You I Love You I Love You.

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#13. They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored.

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#14. There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.

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#15. I was so sad that day. My heart was trying to climb from my body.

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#16. Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill.

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#17. It just breaks / a man's heart, watching / a girl so involved with her life, / without him like that.

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#18. The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.

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#19. She was just so sad. Her whole face hung with it, like sadness was her personal gravity.

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#20. Did anyone think this canon of druggie men were out of control? Only in the most admirable of ways! Out of control like a shaman or a space explorer, like a magician sawing himself in half. Out of control like a poet.

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#21. On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches

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#22. She kissed her like she'd been stranded on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem being tongued into a knot.

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#23. The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.

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#24. She was magnificent. She wasn't so much a person as an event, a gigantic presence.

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#25. Sophie knew about power animals,everyone did ... Sophie thought she might be a cat, she liked cats a lot.

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#26. You try to be good, to be good and loving and nice and not hard, not tough, a sweet nice girl, not ugly, not full of ugliness, but people make it impossible.

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#27. One would think that having grown up broke would make one desperate for financial stability, eager to rest in the economic security of a good job. Rather, it gave me the freedom to take chances. I knew how to get by on next to nothing.

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#28. I wanted her so badly, my heart hung out of my chest like some hound-dog's tongue, pant, pant.

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#29. Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.

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#30. I think it's my job to make any question interesting by coming up with a jazzy answer, otherwise I hardly deserve the spotlight, right?

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#31. Michelle felt that if people didn't like the way they looked in her book then they should have behaved differently.

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#32. She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.

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#33. Remember when i slept with my head in a puddle at your feet? It was humility, or atonement. later your ankle was a pillow and finally you pulled me up and in my sleep i placed your hand above my heart, like i forgot i didn't live there anymore

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#34. I'm never not going to be interested in young girls who are struggling in poor places.

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#35. You would have to forget everything that came out of her mouth in order to later enjoy it on your cock.

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#36. Older Fags and Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus and Ganymede.
Ganymede was a child, Ziggy schooled her.
Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working the Door. You Carded Ganymede.

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#37. There are a lot of queers starved for entertainment from their own community.

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#38. In the corner store we pulled fat bottles of water from the shelves. No one thinks it's weird that we have to buy clean water, and that's how I know we're going to hell.

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#39. To be a butch girl in high school, to be better at masculinity than all the men around you, and then to be punished for it!

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#40. Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.

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#41. I kissed her hand. My seduction technique is best filed under Obvious.

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#42. I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

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#43. Maybe we could all take care of each other, I dreamed.

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#44. It was a huge obsession taking over my life, every injustice leading logically to a related and worse injustice until I was standing in the center of a pulsating ring of pain and torture and oppression and the only real solution was to just kill yourself. Just get off the fucking fucked-up planet.

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#45. No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work.

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#46. The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it.

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#47. I felt pure the way you feel after you vomit, kind of light and strangely holy, like having taken a sauna in hell.

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#48. Oh my God, Michelle thought, I think we're making love. It was a term everyone barfed at. No one wanted to make love, people wanted to fuck, to take each other's skin apart with knives and pin it back together with needles.

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#49. The heartbreak of having written and published a first book is that the world then expected you to write a second.

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#50. I don't mind doing awful things as long as somebody else does. I would totally jump off the bridge, thanks for asking.

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#51. It was a sort of loser luck, I guess, the luck of the cigarette-smoking ghost-grannies who shuffled the scuffed linoleum, but I'd take it over no luck at all.

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#52. Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another.

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#53. In Buddhism, when you have a problem, YOU have a problem. It's yours. When you get over the tantrum you inevitably throw about the injustice of this, it's actually quite nice. If YOU have the problem, you also have the ability to solve it.

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#54. So I kept talking because nothing gets me going like knowing I should shut up. Oh, I should be quiet and full of potential like all those still flowers, but I know I am a weed and I've got to blow my seeds around the garden.

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#55. You can't get lost if you have nowhere to be.

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#56. I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don't know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.

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#57. I'm A Queer Poet Too! She stressed queer not because she walked around identifying as a queer poet but so that the youth understood she would fuck her.

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#58. How many lovers did a person need, anyway?

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#59. How do you make a girl know she's beautiful? What is the system for that, what do you show her, how do you give her a new set of eyes and turn her face back to the mirror?

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#60. Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance.

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#61. Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don't get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.

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#62. This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

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#63. I barely knew her at all. She was on hold, someone I'd be friends with when she got her shit together. And then she died.

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#64. Lots of my writing can be accurately called lesbian, but I myself am queer and date people of all genders.

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#65. Don't you ever fucking write about me! Andy hollered, and was gone.

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#66. I wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.

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#67. Writing was the antijob, the fuck you to all jobs, her claim on her autonomy, what kept her feral and free.

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