Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“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

“Algorithms are demonic," I say. I really do feel this way. They take the art out of everything.”
― Anna Dorn, Exalted

“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

“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 sort of over Freud, who just feels like this secret language old white men use to make whatever they are talking about seem inaccessible. Freud just gives cloaked terms to universal aspects of the human experience, kind of like astrology. Freud is just astrology for men.”
― Anna Dorn, Exalted

“I like femininity â€� long hair and painted fingernails and dancing in my bra to Madonna. I like to be frivolous and free, and for someone else to get the bill.”
― Anna Dorn, Exalted

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

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

“Wishful thinking, chica. I’ve never chilled in my life.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“With gay men, it's completely different. The sex act is unsettling to people, has been criminalized at various points throughout history, but their partnering is championed, met with parades and rainbow flags. With lesbians it's the opposite. The sex act is eroticism, drives the entire porn industry (so I've heard!), but our partnering is unnerving to people.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“Astrology is a scam, but love is the biggest scam of all.”
― Anna Dorn, Exalted

“Now I’m just driving past office parks and outlet malls, feeling excited and oddly patriotic. Lana Del Rey plays on the speakers and I see beauty everywhere. There’s that line in Grey Gardens when Little Edie is digging through a pile of what looks like garbage and mutters, This is all art. She says it quietly and it doesn’t appear on the transcript PDF of the film I’ve read over a hundred times on my laptop, but I’m positive she says it. And now I’m repeating This is all art to myself like a schizophrenic mantra while watching an American flag wave perkily above a P.F. Chang’s.”
― 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

“SpaceX is really romantic if you think about it, just a bunch of Pisces launching rockets into the sky.”
― Anna Dorn, Exalted

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

“laugh too. “Right,â€� I say, then stop laughing. “As if the Clintons didn’t spearhead the prison industrial complex. God forbid anyone knows what they’re talking about.â€� I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m just repeating something I saw on Twitter.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I appreciate that she lets herself laugh. I figured she’d be one of those girls who flatly says I’m dead instead of laughing.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“The last thing young people need is to think more about themselves and their bodies. I, for one, could stand to think about someone else.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I want to remind lesbians it’s okay to revel in the feminine, to be frivolous, submissive, a brat. That we can be sexy and glamorous, and in fact, we’ve always been sexy and glamorous. That Sappho, and Marie Antoinette, and Virginia Woolf, and Patricia Highsmith were all dimes.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I spritz the moon milk, hopefully the perfect amount, nearly undetectable but subtly irresistible.”
― 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

“that exclusivity is not necessarily a bad thing.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

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

“I consider searching my backpack for loose amphetamines, then remember my conversation with Agent Allison. I have to be good and can’t just blurt whatever comes to my head. I have to be thoughtful. A person, not a machine.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“I imagine white florals. Lily of the valley and creamy magnolia, a dewy morning after a spring rain.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“But I need more. All Los Angeles lesbians have a story about dating or almost dating Kristen Stewart. I want a story about how Kristen Stewart tried to kiss me and I ducked.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“as soon as she senses your bite, she begins to turn.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

“You are not good for me, Astrid. I saw you and my heart did its thing. I found myself becoming obsessive, thinking about you constantly, about what was good for you and excuses to talk to you. And I was like, I've seen this movie before, so many times, and I know how it ends.”
― Anna Dorn