Kathy Acker Quotes

If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.

I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for hours. All land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it's becoming harder to get off the roads.

One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn't matter if you're rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn't change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.

Culture is that which falsifies.

Come alive, dead heart, and sing.

Death is another bar which lies several steps below the normal world. I'm at its threshold, but not yet in it. Its doorway is doorless.

We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things.

Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

Fucking just tell me what you want and I'll go with it. That's what you do when you do s/m scenes. You discuss rules beforehand. 'Cause otherwise it's all too dangerous and there has to be trust. Well, it's the same, for me, with vanilla sex or without sex. If you don't discuss the rules, then the shit power games are outside the bed and they hurt. I'm truly no longer interested in either hurting or being hurt. It's all boring and I want to work in this world and to matter. I no longer want my time occupied by hurting and being hurt.

You know I've had work banned.

I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.

There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

It's all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women's liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you.

I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing
writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like.

Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.

In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

There's a point at which when I start to know a man well
this isn't true of women
I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.

There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.

Another reason Hawthorne set his story in the past (in lies) was 'cause he couldn't say directly all the wild things he wanted to say. He was living in a society to which ideas and writing still mattered. In 'The Custom House', the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne makes sure he tells us the story of The Scarlet Letter occurred long ago and has nothing to do with anyone who's now living. After all, Hawthorne had to protect himself so he could keep writing. Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money. Even if one person in Boise, Idaho, gave half-a-shit, the only book Mr Idaho can get his hands on is a book the publishers, or rather the advertisers ('cause all businessmen are now advertisers) have decided will net half-a-million in movie and/or TV rights. A book that can be advertised. Define culture that way.

The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven of going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other

Those who are driven by poverty, those who're free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning.

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.

But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is.

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come up upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body.

You can't change old people. Unlike middle-aged people, they do what they want.

Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous music, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just... Who they are.

LESBIANS are women who prefer their own ways to male ways.
LESBIANS prefer the convoluting halls of sensuality to direct goal-pursuing mores.
LESBIANS have made a small world deep within and separated from the world.
What has usually been called the world is the male world.

You create identity, you're not given identity per se. What became more and more interesting to me wasn't the I, it was text because it's text that create identity. That's how I got interested in plagiarism.

Since Pussy never had thought, nor would she think, that women shouldn't have abortions, she had to come to terms with the realization that to be human, and woman, includes the possibility and even the act of murder.

Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express.

I am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.

I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.

On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.

[ ... ] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.

I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.

I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious

My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer.""What's that?""You have to find out what caused it.

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it

Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.

The ceiling of languages is falling down. Either add to this rubble or shove at least some of it away.
Liberty, shit. The liberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens. The liberty to get diseases no doctor treats or can cure. The liberty to live in conditions cockroaches wouldn't touch except to die in. The liberty to be an eighty-three-year-old Ukranian shuffling around in her slippers among the cat shit in the slum building hallway-'Is there a landlord here? Is there light anywhere?

R wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and about what he, R, wanted:
My friend,
You're eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don't miss Charleville. I don't miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings're being dried up: dead pig Delahaye.
Emotions are the movers of this world.
Me: I'm thirsty. What I'm thirsty for - whom I'm thirsty for - I can't get so I drink poisons. I've got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh - for more poisons. Maybe more poisons'll come and I'll go so far, I'll emerge. Something is trying to emerge from this mess.
I don't know how.

For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.

Every one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand is like every other one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand because the sex in a one-night-stand is without time and only time allows value.

The part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious'. Since it's free of control, it's our only defense against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.

Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.

But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.

What is the language of the 'unconcious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of language or languages that are which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes.

I found out and lost the only place I ever sort of regarded as home. Oh well. Best to stay in one's garden but Voltaire was a boring writer and sex is one of the greatest things there is.

This is the story of V and me.
Look. Each person has the possibilities of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives. The good family man doesn't have a sense of responsibility. Simultaneously, he's my angel. Simultaneously, his family's a pack of incontinent dogs. In front of men such as him who believe they're respectable, I love to talk about who they really are, the people they don't want to know and socially and politically chastise. Look. I have loved and worshiped a pig.
This society hates and locks up its madness because they hate and lock up themselves. I know the system of schizophrenia. Nevertheless I loved a pig and couldn't stop.

It was only when we were in that bed, high above the world - then I thought the birds could have been circling around our bodies circled around each other - that we made our world totally separated from everything else. It was the only way we could be together.

When I returned, not to Berlin, but to Hamburg in the midst of the fog of the beginning of winter, to the road that runs right above it's river and docks, a castle which never existed and a fountain which is really a sewer, a gust of wind far sweeter and more fragrant than any red rose carried the smell of shit and floating soil like a tongue into my nostril.

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.

I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.

The two main girlfriends he has had wanted him to support them in the manner to which they certainly weren't accustomed even though he couldn't put his flabby hands on a penny.

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

Dear David, Are you a Tibetan monk yet? I used to hate you because you didn't love me so much you would give up your whole life for me. I expect this of every man. In retrospect, I realize that I was also selfish: I should have stopped making demands that you not be the closet female-hating sadist you are.

Sometimes I forget this insoluble mess and dream: he'll save me, we'll travel; we'll hunt in the deserts, we'll sleep on the pavements of strange cities, carelessly, without his guilt, without my pain. Or else I'm going to wake up and all the human laws and customs of this world will have changed - thanks to some magical power - or this world, without changing, will let me feel desire and be happy and carefree.
What did I want from him who hurt me more than I thought it was possible for two people to hurt each other? I wanted the adventures found in kids' books. He couldn't give me these because he wasn't able to. Whatever did he want from me? I never understood. He told me he was just average: average regrets, average hopes. What do I care about all that average shit that has nothing to do with adventure?

I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.

If we keep on fucking, I'm not gonna die.

INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
Janey dreams of cocks. Janey sees cocks instead of objects. Janey has to fuck.
This is the way Sex drives Janey crazy: Before Janey fucks, she keeps her wants in cells. As soon as Janey's fucking she wants to be adored as much as possible at the same time as, its other extreme, ignored as much as possible. More than this: Janey can no longer perceive herself wanting. Janey is Want.
It's worse than this: If Janey gets sexually rejected her body becomes sick. If she doesn't get who she wants she naturally revolts.

The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.