Michelle Tea Quotes

“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

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

— Michelle Tea

“You are right where you should be / now act like it”

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

— 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

“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

“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

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

— 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

“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

“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

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

— 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

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

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

— 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

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

— 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

“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

“I kissed her hand. My seduction technique is best filed under Obvious.”

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

“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 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 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

“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

“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