Tracey Emin Quotes

“The Margate of my mind has the most beautiful sunsets that stretch across the entire horizon. Sharp white cliffs divide a charcoal blue sea from the hard reality of the land.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE THE PAST HEAD ON.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“I didn’t know what strange games were. To me, it was all part of living. A strange living. I had never known the truth so I had never cared for the truth, rationality or reason. I lived in a world of dreams, good and bad.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“Margate’s never been easy, always hard. ‘If you want a dirty weekend, go to Margate,’ I always say. You can be as dirty as you like. Van Gogh and Turner, Ronnie Biggs and the Krays all went there. Romans, Vikings, Hell’s Angels, teds, mods, rockers and punks, they all fought there.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“…I wasn’t a kid. I was thirteen: I had been raped, I had lost my front teeth and I had suffered disillusionment with life. But I knew there was something better: there was an outside – an outside of me. And somewhere that wasn’t Margate.

Yet I owe so much to that place I grew up, mainly because it is so beautiful. And what is so fantastic and beautiful is the sunset, and that is free.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don’t know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another’s. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself.

I want to go to sleep and wake with my skin taut. I want to feel cum on my face. I want to laugh with my eyes open.

I want to sleep with my eyes closed.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“When I was 14 – 15 there was nothing to do in my life but dancing and sex. I’d go to nightclubs and dance then I’d meet someone and have sex. It was fine and easy. Nothing to do but think with my body. Like a bird I thought I was free.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“He’d kind of vanished off the face of the earth. A difficult thing to do in Margate, a derelict seaside town where there was nothing to do but blend in with the general decay: bum around, fuck, be fucked, fight and wish your life away.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“Anyways, I suddenly had an urge to put my watch on. Time or no time, I wanted some worldly security. That’s what watches do: they keep us bound to this world. Dreams don’t have time. Neither does sleep, nor death. That’s why it is sometimes good to wear a watch.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“Strange living. I always had a strange life. Never knowing what was true, living in a world of dreams. Christ, I told myself, I’ve got to get up. But with the weight of my thoughts, I felt I couldn’t breathe. Why did I keep taking on all of this – this shit and keep feeling it even after it had passed through me a hundred million times?”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“M. Masculinity, Manhood. What makes a man a Man? As a woman at the dawn of mid-life, I can confess to having learned, for sure, that I have more testosterone in my right foot then most men have surging around their entire bodies.

You don’t have to be born with balls to have balls. There is spunk and there is mental spunk, and it’s the latter that gets me up in the mornings, that makes me change my life, that moves the world around me.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“I is for me. I cannot believe how much I have fucked up in love. At least, physically. I don’t believe I have mentally. For some weird reason, all of my tiny horrors have been liveable. I have not died. In fact, life has become better. Through age and experience there has come realisation: life is worth living.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“I always loved ‘Gullivers Travel’s. A giant man in a tiny world, a tiny man in a giant world. And there is one line I remember, though perhaps I imagined it: ‘I like a tiny man with a lot of spunk in him.’

Well, I’m a tiny man and so have I. And I can prove it.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“And all the things I think, and all the things I believe, are making me cry.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“At the beginning of 1992, I left art. It was a terrible break-up: all part of my emotional suicide, when I attempted to give up everything I loved that did not love me back.

It was a destructive time. But also a time of revelation. I was twenty-eight years old. I had spent seven years in and out of art college. I had a first-class degree in fine art and I had spent three years out of art school, struggling to make something beautiful, only to arrive at the tearful conclusion that I would never be a great artist. My life was too important to chop into little pieces in the attempt to make art. That was why I had always failed… Like a wounded bird, I began to rebuild myself, using the experience of failure as my foundation.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“Me and my mum send most of our time on the phone discussing EastEnders: Grant and Tiffany; the prospect of Sharon returning to the square, perhaps with Michelle Fowler, both with babies, both fathered by Grant; the happy irony of Michelle and Sharon being truly related. We all slip into these unreal worlds as a release from the daily drudgery.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“Strangely enough, you’ll find the less sex a person has, the less they masturbate. I have a close friend who assures me she has only masturbated five times in her life. Of course, there is the theory that she doesn’t have a vagina. Then again, I know for a fact that most of her daily life, including her work, is wrapped up in fantasy. Leaving her eyes crystal clear.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“I tried to tell people about it, but I was drunk: they thought I was talking in riddles or metaphors.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“It’s now six a.m. and I’m smoking. Oh yeah, Tracey: it’s all going so fucking well. The lonely princess. Carbon monoxide is feeding my soul.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“A mad desire to be more human, to be more normal, that’s what pushes me, these days – but as someone said the other day. "Trace, you’re going to have to face facts. You and normal, parted a long, long time ago.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland