77 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.