Top 35 Michelle Tea Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don’t know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.”

— Michelle Tea

2. “You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.”

— Michelle Tea

3. “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?”

— Michelle Tea

4. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

5. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

6. “The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you’re happy is a sham. I didn’t even want to be happy anymore because I’d rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

8. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

9. “She was magnificent. She wasn’t so much a person as an event, a gigantic presence.”

— Michelle Tea

10. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

11. “Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

13. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

14. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

15. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Michelle Tea

17. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

19. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

20. “So I kept talking because nothing gets me going like knowing I should shut up. Oh, I should be quiet and full of potential like all those still flowers, but I know I am a weed and I’ve got to blow my seeds around the garden.”

— Michelle Tea

21. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

24. “There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

26. “You can’t get lost if you have nowhere to be.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

29. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

30. “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 waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse.”

— Michelle Tea

31. “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!”

— Michelle Tea

32. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

35. “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.”

— Michelle Tea

36. “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 Tea

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

— Michelle Tea

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

— Michelle Tea