Sigrid N. > Sigrid N.'s Quotes

“Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.”
― Eileen Myles

“...feel the fierce way desire
tourniquets itself around you and
clings

Clubland South of Market tweak-
chic trannies powder their noses from
bullet-shaped compacts and flick their forked
tongues like switchblades as they burn the night
down bleed day to night to day to

Mission sidewalks where pythons hide
twenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues which
get bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz and
tossed out through the cracks

Cottonmouth kisses
camouflage emotions and
strike with a vengeance
when he
wants and she
wants and they
want and I
won't

Genet was right, I suppose
when he wrote "The only way
to avoid the horror of horror is
to give in to it"
it's
the nature of
the economy of the
business it's the
nature of
things...”
― Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses

“never say amen in church if they're
capping off a prayer about you.”
― Exene Cervenka, Adulterers Anonymous

“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.”
― Michelle Tea, Valencia

“I wake up and I see the face of the devil and I ask him, "What time is it?"

And he says,
How much time do you want?”
― Diamanda Galas, The Shit of God

“I can count all the lovers I've had on one hand...if I'm holding a calculator.”
― Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography – A Disarming Memoir in the Tradition of Byron and Wilde

“Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown.

— Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After"

from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache”
― Clint Catalyst, Michelle Tea, Thea Hillman, Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person

“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

“There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.

I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.”
― Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses

“and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical sense
and are not easy to fool with laughter”
― Charles Bukowski

“I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.”
― Kathleen Hanna

“Morning breaks. So do bottles and bones.”
― Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses

“the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“YOU YOU YOU

your eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook
crackling and yellow, curling at the edges
a book of myths
in which i do not appear.”
― Clint Catalyst, Caresses Soft as Sandpaper

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”
― Derek Jarman

“i was really into communal living and we were all /
such free spirits, crossing the country we were /
nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class....and it’s just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they’re all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i’d love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i’ve been cooking / for y’all but i’ve got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok?”
― Michelle Tea, The Beautiful: Collected Poems

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“Bullshit is as common as lame poetry and more unavoidable than
those armed men who are there to protect you from
Bullshit like this is straight from the lab and god loves you and
the government doesn't want war and it's the best movie since
Repo Man and if i stopped drinking the world might end anyway
and breathanarianism and immortality for anything besides

Bullshit that's as common as murder and jailhouse tattoos selling
bunk drugs in paint chip hotels where a cigarette burn on
the mattress tells you more about death than a splatter movie
festival.”
― Sparrow 13 Laughingwand, Hell Soup: The Collected Writings of

“For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity.

Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting."

Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories.

The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it.

— excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst

appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation

“In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative.”
― Peter Dubé, Best Gay Stories 2012

“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, Rose of No Man's Land

“Methamphetamine is so Flowers for Algernon: All that super-human cerebral ability fades to limited physical activities like stapling carpet scraps to the wall or masturbation antics worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.”
― Clint Catalyst, Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person

“...my body has become
another country
and I feel like an unemployed
illegal alien
how will I survive
where I do not belong
I belong with you”
― Patrick Califia-Rice

“i wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.”
― Michelle Tea, Rent Girl

“Kindly remove your shoes from my bullshit.”
― Jarod Kintz, Seriously delirious, but not at all serious

“A charm has only as much power as one puts into it./ I wear it because it is such a pretty thing./ And the person who gave it to me/ cared enough for my protection:/ a reason greater than any faith.”
― Justin Chin, Harmless Medicine

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."

— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A Lie"

from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache”
― Clint Catalyst and MIchelle Tea