Michelle Tea Quotes

Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown.
- Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After"
from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache ~ Clint Catalyst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never b ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The messed-up queers Michelle ran with tempted fate daily, were creating a new way to live, new templates for everything – life, death, beauty, aging, art. ~ 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

You can't let the apocalypse rule your life. ~ 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'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

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

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

Most Tea Party members are old pride-filled morons who have no good reasoning to concern themselves with politics, just tired old self-righteous and self-proclaimed patriots wanting to start some type of Nazi-like revolution, mainly because they hate Obama and they have a dumb sense that their lives and generation is quickly coming to a halt and none of them like it. They claim they don't want their rights stripped away from them, so they will do anything in their power to stop that, including stripping away the rights of others. ~ J.C. Wickhart

When women earn the money for the family, everyone in the family benefits. We also know that when women have an income, everyone wins because women dedicate 90% of the income to health, education, to food security, to the children, to the family, or to the community, so when women have an income, everybody wins. ~ Michelle Bachelet

Coffee - a barbaric drink. That poor, tortured bean. All that fermenting and husking and roasting and grinding. And what is tea? Tea is dried leaves rehydrated. Just add water, Mrs. Strickland. All living things need water. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

I'm never going to understand the Barrani."
"You needn't sound so morose, Lord Kaylin. They are unlikely to understand you either."
"Yes, but I'm unlikely to try to kill them for fun. ~ Michelle Sagara West

He mouths something so slowly that his snarling lips articulate the sound of each and every letter, but I read them as though his silent words blast as loud as a battle cry. "Kill her! ~ Michelle Warren

We don't need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend. We have the tools at our disposal to reverse it. All we need is the motivation, the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done ... With this report, we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation. ~ Michelle Obama

See, that's a coffee drinker's problem,' Marina said. 'Meanwhile, I'm perfectly fine with tea bags.'
'I love that there's such a rivalry,' said Charlie. 'It's like, leaf watt versus bean water, you know? ~ Robyn Schneider

take free food or tea from anyone talking about God
and find Heaven
its gotta be out there
for there must be God
and how could any talk of good or God be wrong ~ Dito Montiel

He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu. ~ Anne Lamott

people always say that it hurts at night
and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am
is the romantic equivalent of being heartbroken.
but sometimes
it's 9am on a tuesday morning
and you're standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up

and the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much
you don't know what to do with your hands. ~ Rosie Scanlan

And when that time comes, let's hope your friends outnumber your enemies. ~ Michelle Moran

I missed you," I said.
"Missed you, too. Welcome home."
We moved in to hug each other, then I sprang back seconds before getting smushed against his still-sopping-wet sweater.
"Ben!"
"Ooh, poor form on my part," he said, and peeled off his sodden sweater. He wore a thin white T-shirt underneath. The coffee spill had left the shirt a bit damp, and it clung slightly to his chest in a way that made me stare and caught my voice in my throat.
That was ridiculous, of course. Ben and I had the kind of friendship where we talked about things like that. I could tease him about his suddenly well-toned body; he'd make some kind of self-effacing joke and parry by bringing up something absurd he'd seen about me in a magazine...
But I didn't say a word. And I didn't stop looking. Clearly I was in a sleep-deprived haze.
"You could still try the coffee," he offered. "There's plenty in the sweater. I can just wring it right into the mug."
I shook off my reverie. "Tempting offer, but no thanks. You really need to give up on the coffee thing. I'm never converting from tea."
"We'll see," he said. He set the wet sweater on the hand towel, then turned to me with his arms out. "Better?"
"Much," I said, and closed the distance between us so he could fold me into his arms.
"Hel-lo! Please tell me I'm interrupting something!" It was Rayna, and at the sound of her voice, Ben and I sheepishly pulled apart. Again, ridiculous. Hugging was nothing unus ~ Hilary Duff

I'm riding my man Obama. I think he's a visionary. Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was 'Do the Right Thing.' I said, Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to 'Soul Man.' Michelle would have been like 'What's wrong with this brother?' ~ Spike Lee

I will play the characters with last names like Sanchez and Gonzalez until the day I die, but I also want to play the 'Michelle Smiths.' ~ Gina Rodriguez

Where's Kraven? Is he stalking me too?"
His mouth went tight. "I'm not stalking you. ~ Michelle Rowen

I have a choice. I can whine about things that have happened, and can't be undone, or I can make the best of the situation I'm in. ~ Michelle Diener

Yep, I'm making a fool of myself. Again. Right in front of Nash.
Is there no end to my embarrassment with this guy? ~ Michelle Leighton

The King had advertised the old magic tea set, but for some reason, no one wanted sugar teeth that could gouge their eyes out. ~ Heather Dixon

I called Miss Daphne, but she says she doesn't want 'er tea. She's got 'er nose stuck in a book. Useless, I think it's called, by some woman named Joyce. ~ Alan Bradley

When Mats came in the evenings, they would drink tea in the kitchen while reading their books and talking about them. If Katri came in, they were quiet and waited for her to leave. The back door would close, and Katri would have gone.
"Does your sister read our books?" Anna wanted to know.
"No. She reads literature. ~ Tove Jansson

One of my favorite stories is from Obama's first campaign: Michelle Obama was out there every day, collecting signatures and supervising the other people who did. If you were supposed to get 300 signatures and you only got 299, you had to face the wrath of Michelle. ~ Jodi Kantor

He is either a pompous ass or helplessly in love with you,' she told me, 'and, from the way you did not colour when you mentioned him, I should say the former. Oh, how disappointing. I had hoped he would have made you his mistress by now. How I could have entertained my tea-circle with that story. But do not worry, I shall anyway. ~ M. R. C. Kasasian

I'm very conscious of the fact that when I'm working, my daughter is not with one of her parents. ~ Michelle Williams

"So I've got to find a mountiain that nobody's ever seen. And work out the answer to a riddle that nobody's ever solved. And kill a bear that nobody can fight."
Renn sucked in her breath. "You've go to try." ~ Michelle Paver

You go away and have a nice cup of hot tea,' said the agent, soothingly, 'and you'll be as right as anything in the morning. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

And I sit down at the kitchen table and realize that Mom really died. That she'll never come back. And that I am alone. Cold hands reach out for me, threaten to pull me into a dark place where I might never escape, and I let them. It's like I'm trapped in a block of ice that nothing can penetrate. Everything around me is just a blur of colour, a flash of movement, garbled sounds. I can't quite decipher and don't want to. Time passes like sludge ~ Michelle Krys

Will my future faith be dominated by past demons? Will my unlimited possibilities give way to my limited territory?
Read more in
A Daughter's Worth Novel ~ Michelle Carithers

The desert feels Irish in a way - lonely and barren. If someone said, 'Think of a happy place for you,' I'd say a glacial plane near the South Pole, the wind howling, nobody in sight, a shack with a pot-belly stove and some tea. ~ Donal Logue

Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor. ~ Tea Obreht

As I've gotten older and grown more independent, I think for myself, and that's how it should be. ~ Michelle Kwan

While Daniel disappeared into his room, probably to limn the contours of some exquisite constellation of philosophical nonsense for his internship applications and gasp in the throes of his overachieving OCDness. ~ Michelle Hodkin

The average Negro has largely lost faith in middle-class whites. In his hour of need he seeks not "talk" but dynamic action. He looks upon the middle-class idea of long-term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust. He is interested only in what can be achieved immediately by political pressure to get jobs, decent housing, and education for his children. He describes with disgust the efforts in his behalf by most middle-class Negro and white intellectuals as "pink tea methods--some times well-meanin' but gettin' us nowhere. ~ Bayard Rustin

To try. To live through the horror of failure; to endure the guilt. To try again. To make that choice. ~ Michelle Sagara

Josie, I've had my breath taken away before by a beautiful woman, but let's just say, that's not what happened." - John McCray ~ Michelle Schlicher

An 'eye for an eye' shall leave you all blind.
It's sometimes better to walk away and know you will still be able to see the beauty that tomorrow will bring. ~ Michelle Horst

Your dreams must be bigger than your fear. Embrace all opportunities and be all you are destined to be. ~ Michelle Cruz

I have made a personal decision NOT TO WORRY. This has tremendously contributed to my happiness!! ~ Sandra M. Michelle

I love teaching people how to handle their money and I've built a brand on that skill. ~ Michelle Singletary

People are going to say a lot of things. And some of it will be helpful, and some of it will be annoying, and lots of it will get on your nerves. But they're saying it because they found it helpful when they lost someone. They mean well. ~ Michelle Falkoff

If you yell about one woman, you're not a misogynist. If I yell about Michelle Bachman, that doesn't make me a misogynist. If I compare all women to Michelle Bachman, then I'm a misogynist. ~ Lewis Black

We were received with warmth and bustling kindliness by the proprietor....She called us "you boys" and acted as if she had been expecting us for days, possibly years.
"Goodness me, just look at you boys!" she clucked in astonishment and delight. "You look as if you've been wrestling bears!"
I suppose we must have looked a sight. Katz was liberally covered in blood from his fraught stumble through the woods, and there was tiredness all over us, even in our eyes.
"Now you boys go up and get yourselves cleaned up and come down to the porch and I'll have a nice jug of iced tea waiting for you. Or would you rather lemonade? Never mind, I'll make both. Now go on!" And off she bustled.
"Thanks, Mom," we muttered in dazzled and grateful unison. ~ Bill Bryson