Michelle Tea Quotes

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 con...

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 di...

About Author

Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik, 1971) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and was active in the San Francisco literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.

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...

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

Older Fags and Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus and Ganymede. Ziggy schooled her.Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working the Door. You Carded Ganymed...

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 s...

On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches

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.

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 wait...

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 ca...

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

She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.

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

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

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

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

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 liv...

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

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...

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