Perfume & Pain Quotes

“I hate going home, but guilt compels me. It’s not that I hate my family or anything. I just feel very uncomfortable around them and harbor the vague suspicion that they hate me, which isn’t entirely unfounded given that while they’ve been supportive in a material and financial sense, they mostly seem to find my personality, affect, choices, and demeanor to be unpleasant at best.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I sit down wanting to write the great lesbian love story, but wacko bitches just keep coming out.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume and Pain

“Penelope laughs. Her teeth are very white for someone who doesn’t have a dishwasher.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“The weird thing about being a writer is that at 25, you’re passionate and eager to share what you consider to be your sui generis perspective, but you haven’t practiced enough to be effective, and no one takes you seriously either way. And then ten years later, you’ve finally written enough to know what you’re doing, but you’ve completely lost the sense of urgency, you’re officially middle-aged and shop at the Gap,”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“As long as I’m busy working on a project, I can keep my impulse control issues in check. I just can’t let my brain go idle, that’s when the demons take hold, the demons that tempt me, et cetera.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I’ve always felt more comfortable with a new lover than with an old friend.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Exiting the freeway, I experience a brief moment of gratitude that I’m a lesbian. That I don’t have to get Botox or filler or a ponytail facelift because to do so would invite the male gaze, and it’s the female gaze I’m after, and we just want compelling, which is energetic and cannot be reduced to a visual.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I am not a new woman. I am acting out. I am the exact same bitch.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“When I first moved to LA, I was constantly impressed and intimidated. Everyone was a producer or a director or an actress. Then I realized everyone was lying and delusional and a barista.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I’m thrilled Penelope is talking about her exes. God forbid people talk about their jobs or their diets. Relationships, crushes, falling in love and out of it, breakups, heartbreak, these are the only conversation topics I recognize. “Laura is the girl you made the cake for?” I ask. “Woman, yes,” she says and I’m thankful for the amphetamines because I don’t even begin to roll my eyes.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Somehow I always end up becoming the type of person I once made fun of.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“As a difficult woman, I’ve always been drawn to LA: its cotton candy–colored smog and pre-apocalyptic climate, sunning lizards, lazy diction, palm trees, strip malls, bad values. It’s a goal-oriented town but pretends not to be, and I live for artifice. I want to be around people who are as concerned as I am that Brittany Murphy and her weird husband died within months of each other of the same mysterious cause, people who want to spend their evenings guessing what happened.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“he formed his identity in reaction to me, as most siblings do.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I open a blank Google Doc and write: if psychotic, then write memoir.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“She wears tortoiseshell glasses and a green ribbon in her hair, a precocious little brat.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“What’s the Maya Angelou quote? When someone shows you who they are, ignore them entirely and project whatever you want?”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Yeah,” I say. “And it’s always the ACAB bitches who are most desperate to punish you.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I have relatively thick skin when it comes to people I don’t know, and very thin, nearly anorexic skin when it comes to people I do know.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I still remember the quote on the book’s cover: “She was pink and gold, soft and sweet… too strong a temptation to resist.” I wanted to be a pink and gold temptation”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I often struggle with conveying the appropriate emotional response, but excitement is always the hardest to muster. I suspect my blasé affect is a carefully calculated defense mechanism. And my defense mechanisms—it’s becoming increasingly clear—are no longer defending me. Maybe they never were.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“. Basic women love to tell me I’m subversive. I’m the basic woman’s edgy. That’s my market, and I must respect”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“My dream is a femme-presenting woman who can take charge, dominate me, slap me, objectify me, turn me into a little shiny object to be adored then punished. Forever a little girl in trouble.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Think don’t speak the cancelable thoughts.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“When people hate something, I love it. When people love it, I hate it. It’s not the best quality, being an insufferable contrarian, but much like Paglia, “I positively glory in homosexuality’s oppositional character.” And is there anything more contrarian than dating women?”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I’m embarrassed I sent such a long text. Very unchill. But I’ve never been chill and it’s never stopped women from falling in love with me. Chill is the hallmark of a slow and uninteresting brain.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Meanwhile, smart and nuanced thinkers are being called derogative names merely for asking questions.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“And lately it seems like the meanest people online, the biggest bullies with the smallest brains, are obsessed with using misguided political rhetoric as a vehicle for wishing harm upon others.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“as I am decidedly not butch. For this reason, it took years to convince people I was a lesbian. Most people thought I was just being an edgelord.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“but anyway I’ve told them I want to smell like a Parisian It Girl and sequoia trees at dusk, like Kate Moss in the ’90s and a Malibu cloud.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Once I started reading, I realized I liked books about angry, quick-witted women with major interpersonal issues, a genre known on Goodreads as “she’s not doing okay at all.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain