Michelle Tea Quotes & Sayings

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible. — Michelle Tea

She was just so sad. Her whole face hung with it, like sadness was her personal gravity. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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 — Michelle Tea

If I talk about the bad old days of crystal meth for too long, I start getting like, "Oh ... speed ... that was delicious ... " But in general, I don't so much. Or wait - maybe the recklessness just occurs in a different sphere so it doesn't look like bottoming out. But really - isn't trying to have a baby sort of a reckless thing to do? — Michelle Tea

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

How many lovers did a person need, anyway? — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that's why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away like a needle lifting from the vinyl at the end of the song, we knew this. The music would cease, one of us would die or else we'd just break up, and this drove us to drink from each other like two twelve-year-olds sneaking vodka from the liquor cabinet, trying to get it all down, trying to get as fucked up as possible before we got caught. — Michelle Tea

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

Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked. — Michelle Tea

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

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

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. — Michelle Tea

It smelled of oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers. — Michelle Tea

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

I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. — Michelle Tea

I was really into communal living and we were all /
such free spirits, crossing the country we were /
nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class ... and it's just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they're all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i'd love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i've been cooking / for y'all but i've got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok? — Michelle Tea

This mouth had kissed me so much it had worn its own grooves into my teeth. It was like settling into the armchair that fit exactly the round of your body, only it was incredibly exciting because everything was different now, and it was horribly wrong to be kissing. It would only prolong everything. I sat there in the bus shelter, back up against the glass, hoping the bug would never come. Desperation is the sexiest emotion. — Michelle Tea

I wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour. — Michelle Tea

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

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 — Michelle Tea

I'm never not going to be interested in young girls who are struggling in poor places. — Michelle Tea

The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it. — Michelle Tea

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another. — Michelle Tea

One of the most powerful things I'd learned since getting sober is to love and accept life on life's terms. Alcoholics have a hard time doing this; we're little id-driven crybabies, guzzling and complaining about how nothing in this life goes the way we think it should. Accepting and even embracing the world as it is can be radical, and it can have powerful, positive results. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

I kissed her hand. My seduction technique is best filed under Obvious. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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

Don't you ever fucking write about me! Andy hollered, and was gone. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

You can't get lost if you have nowhere to be. — Michelle Tea

And give me insults, give me
economic discrimination, give me
the darkened parking lot of a
windowless queer bar, give me
fleets of bigots and books banned
in libraries across america, feed the world
with lies about my life and plop a second
helping of oppression on my plate
and thank you for not making me straight. — Michelle Tea

To have someone know you so thoroughly and not want you. Is there anything more painful? — Michelle Tea

There are a lot of queers starved for entertainment from their own community. — Michelle Tea

Am I in an abusive relationship? Because even though Fake Johnny Depp's torments were never physical, they made me feel so completely unhinged that I actually hit myself. Nothing slams the self-esteem like hitting your own freaking self. This was the cycle of violence I found myself in, due in no small part to the heady effects of — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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

I have had the occasion of coming into money and spending some recklessly, like on a purse. At this point, shopping and the spending of money on things like Botox gives me the rush I used to get copping drugs on the street. Or, making other people cop drugs for me on the street. I didn't like to do that. I wanted to protect my reputation. — Michelle Tea

You are right where you should be / now act like it — Michelle Tea

Maybe we could all take care of each other, I dreamed. — Michelle Tea

People like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation ... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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? — Michelle Tea

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

It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment. — Michelle Tea

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! — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

She didn't know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn't know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

Michelle was shocked at how many beauty products were marketed at balm for swollen eyes. She imagined thousands of female consumers sobbing hysterically all night and acting like there was no problem by day, smearing cream into their haggard faces at the bathroom mirror. She was part of a demographic. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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.
— Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

So, go to Paris. If you can't do that, go somewhere. Take a road trip, a train trip, a bus trip if you must. Find a place that reminds you that the world is so much bigger than your heart and whoever broke it this time around. Go hang out by the ocean and trip out on its mammoth ancientness. Offer it your heartache - it's big enough to hold it, to dilute it with all that salt and water, melt it away to nothing. Salt purifies. Take a dunk if you can stand it. You're alive. That relationship was but one chapter in your long, long story, one little scene in your epic. — Michelle Tea

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

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. — Michelle Tea

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

Sophie could feel Syrena's sigh; the mermaid's body beneath her sagged with it. "Can't even be mad at you," the mermaid said, her voice little more than a mumble. "You too stupid to even be mad at. You live in world without poetry, without poets. You think poet's job to tell your mother happy birthday. You are such a fool you don't even know you are a fool. How can I be mad at such fool? Poet's job to create the world. — Michelle Tea

She was magnificent. She wasn't so much a person as an event, a gigantic presence. — Michelle Tea

Michelle wasn't butch enough to mess around with men. It would be simply heterosexual, and slutty. For Ziggy and Stitch it was something else, proof of their toughness. They could tumble around with this guy and emerge from the van as queer as ever, more queer, even, and the man might now in fact be a bit queer from his time spent cracked out in Ziggy's butch bosom. — Michelle Tea

You can't let the apocalypse rule your life. — Michelle Tea

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? — Michelle Tea

On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches — Michelle Tea

Andrea worked to harden herself to the onslaught of feelings. The problem with feelings was, first you had one, which was generally bad enough. But then you had a feeling about your feeling, and then a feeling about how you were feeling about your feeling, and then another feeling would pop up at the sight of it all, this teetering pyramid of emotion, and all of it would look wrong to Andrea, all her feeling somehow incorrect, too much or too little, too soft or too hard, and another feeling would emerge at the thought of that. It was endless, having feelings. And god forbid someone noticed you having them, as Sophie just had. Then you had feelings about that, about having been seen, and more feelings still about the other person's feelings. Oh, it was awful. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

I was so sad that day. My heart was trying to climb from my body. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

If you ask me, houses shouldn't have been built down here. These little block-long streets cease abruptly at the open space that remains on the side of the hill, and the hill is angry that development has crept so close. It whips these pathetic homes with a battering, constant wind. It sends soggy clouds to sit damply atop the roofs, trickling stagnant moisture, birthing deep green molds. It sends its monsters, the horrifying Jerusalem crickets, up from the soil to invade basement apartments, looking like greasy, translucent alien insects. They drive me crying into the bathroom to strategize their eviction from my home. — Michelle Tea

Sophie knew about power animals,everyone did ... Sophie thought she might be a cat, she liked cats a lot. — Michelle Tea

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. — Michelle Tea

I've been dreaming about having a press forever, like the '90s. I've always known so many great writers who aren't as connected to the publishing world as they should be, and I have the energy and the enthusiasm to sort of gather and promote people, so I've always thought someday I might embark on a big project like that. — Michelle Tea

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

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