Quotes from 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

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

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

The same, but different. I went somewhere she would never go and brought a loneliness back, and I would have to climb over it to reach her.

I have such faith in words. Like the right combination spilling from my mouth could have made her look at me like she looked at all of them, eyes blue and bright as a kid.

How can an attraction rooted in such deep insecurity not result in obsession?

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

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.

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.

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.

Sometime the shittiest, most oppressive thing about being a girl is how good you're supposed to be all the time. And sometime that feeling of an enforced, expected goodness can come from feminism. The thing about being a poet, an artist, a writer is you can't be good. You shouldn't have to be good. You should, for the sake of your art, your soul, and your life go through significant periods of time when you are defying many notions of goodness.

Pages are the students of the suit, suggestive of a person who has yet to master its special powers but who is earnestly engaged in figuring it all out. Knights are super action-oriented, ready to GO, on the double, like, yesterday! Queens are self-assured and generous, a bit interior, strong and meditative. Kings are likewise so but more extroverted and action-oriented.

So the crush withered and died the way things that aren't being fed usually do.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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