Chris Kraus Quotes

You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn't witnessing contain complicity? "You think too much," is what they always said when their curiosity ran out.

You're aware there are things you once valued and were proud of in yourself, but they exist at a remove now, because they're overwhelmed by the question of whether they would be good and acceptable to him. Morality, ambition, desire, pleasure all take a backseat to, What would he think of this, and how shall I describe it to him? All you care about is maximizing his impression of you.

Perhaps not passionate but comfortable. We could have gone on like that forever and then you came, the rambling man, with all these expatriate philosophies that we've outgrown ourselves over the past 20 years. This is really not our problem, Dick. You're leading a ghost town life, infecting everyone who comes near you with a ghost disease. Take it back, Dick. We don't need it.

Dear Dick, I wrote in one of many letters, what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it's least described

Anyway we told him Liza'd do the physical part of sex, I'd do the verbal. Together we incarnated the cyborgian split projected on all females by this culture

I found the second story that I'd ever written, 20 years ago in Wellington. It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don't think anyone will listen.

They dug each other's references and felt smarter in each other's presence.

Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. ("Complicity is like a girl's name," writes Dodie Bellamy).

As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.

Fuck her once, she'll write a book about it

There's a lot of madness in New Zealand because it's a mean and isolated little country. Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.

Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.

No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.

The message is, IT'S GETTING LATE. Be glad you're in a California art school but don't forget you live by compromise and contradiction cause those who don't just die like dogs.

How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I'd ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way I knew of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words.

But since Catt was more realist than fabulist, she understood her actual death at the hands of her killer would be something much slower. It would be a classical feminine death, like a marriage…Raised by meek working-class parents, she despised petty groveling and had no talent for making shit up. She wanted to be a "real" intellectual moving with dizzying freedom between high and low points in the culture. And to a certain extent, she'd succeeded. Catt's semi-name attracted a following among Asberger's boys, girls who'd been hospitalized for mental illness, sex workers, Ivy alumnae on meth, and always, the cutters. With her small self-made fortune, Catt saw herself as Moll Flanders, out-sourcing her visiting professorships and writing commissions to younger artists whose work she believed in. But she'd reached a point lately where the same young people she'd helped were blogging against her, exposing the 'cottage industry' she ran out of her Los Angeles compound facing the Hollywood sign … the same compound these bloggers had lived in rent-free after arriving from Iowa City, Alberta, New Zealand. Loathing all institutions, Catt had become one herself. Even her dentist asked her for money.

[Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.

There were some low moments out there on the road tonight - abandonment and what's the point? - but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.

Dear Dick, I'm wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the '70s has been read only as "collaborative" and "feminist.

Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies.

To initiate something is to play the fool.

Why do people think that we're degraded when we're examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?

If I can't make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering 'Would he like me?', I wonder 'Is he game?' When

I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education - a

Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind, I said, 20 percent had to come from you. You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication.

Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally.

The more I get into it the more isolated I feel vis-à-vis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind... I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir...It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case... You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside... With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity... (citing Jane Bowles, 1947)

Remaining adolescent means rejecting all compensatory lies about one's life ...

The difference between now and fifteen years ago is I don't think I was able, ever, to write any of those notebooks then in the 1st Person. I had to find these ciphers for myself because whenever I tried writing in the 1st Person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can't stop writing in the 1st Person, it feels like it's the last chance I'll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.

I'm thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss - a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.

Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, ... panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut.

It was April the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell

Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality.

When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.

The panic of altruism: sadness rests inside the body, always, nascent like the inflammation of a chronic disease.
Therefore, empathy is not a reaching outward. It is a loop. Because there isn't any separation any more between what you are and what you see.

I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I'm drawn to you cause I see how you can help me take my life apart...

It's going to be crazy. All eight teams here are good teams. Hopefully the atmosphere will be great because it's going to be great basketball.

If wisdom's silence then it's time to play the fool.

We've met a few times and I've felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer... I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together.

Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.
... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.

If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.

The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?

It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.

My entire state of being's changed because I'v become my sexuality: female, straight, wanting to love men, be fucked. Is there a way of living with this like a gay person, proudly? (p. 186)

...There it was, deep & huge like it'd just risen, nearly full and red orange like a blood tangerine. It felt ominous, and I'm wondering if you feel as I do - this incredible urge TO BE HEARD. Who do you talk to?

Leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language when you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shut down is the only way back in.

Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?

It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.

Study's good, because it microcosms everything - if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything's separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down.

Oh Dick, you eroticise what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.

Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it's neuroticised and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.

All acts of sex were forms of degradation.
... What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?

Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.

But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred.

Because the world itself is now unfathomable, the only complexities that really count are small moments of domestic life that combine to trigger deep emotion. There is no longer any way of being poor in any interesting way in major cities like Manhattan