Quotes from Michelle Tea

How many lovers did a person need, anyway?

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

This upscale Marin whorehouse allowed the men to come and pick from the lineup of women like we were donuts in a pastry case.

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.

The life I wanted, one with healthy relationships and less regret, a healthy body and less sickness, a stronger career and less floundering, would only ever be mine if I passed through this time of darkness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.