Quotes from Michelle Tea

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.

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.

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.

Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently crusting on her face. She had to speak through it when she talked.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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