Best 42 quotes of Michelle Tea on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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?

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.

. 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

...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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. ...Queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through out families' rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we've faced, the ways in which we've violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we've endured as a result of society's loathing, unharmed. Whatever of theses wounds I didn't experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not ins some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

So tortured about what? 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 that palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart the 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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.