Chris Kraus Quotes

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

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). ~ Chris Kraus

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

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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 ~ Chris Kraus

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 ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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) ~ Chris Kraus

To initiate something is to play the fool. ~ Chris Kraus

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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 ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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

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 ~ Chris Kraus

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

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? ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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 ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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? ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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... ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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? ~ Chris Kraus

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

...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? ~ Chris Kraus

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) ~ Chris Kraus

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

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. ~ Chris Kraus

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. ~ Chris Kraus

Alcohol is like pouring smiles on your brain. ~ Chris Hardwick

The world is a lot more fun when you approach it with an exuberant imperfection. ~ Chris Baty

Chris Cornell: I think Pearl Jam was the band that set the perfect example. Their big video, "Jeremy," propelled them into becoming TV stars and one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, so they stopped making videos, which was proof positive that that wasn't where they wanted to be. And that made a lot of sense to me.

Nirvana doing an Unplugged at the same time that they did it and making a video for "Heart-Shaped Box," that didn't make a lot of sense to me, because it seemed clear to me that Kurt was pretty disillusioned by the situation that he was being put in. It felt like, If he's so unhappy, he shouldn't be doing this kind of stuff. ~ Mark Yarm

Look at pictures of me growing up. It wasn't always the way it is now. It was a bumpy road for me. ~ Chris Evans

I don't like artists who are actors. I like artists, but I don't believe in that. ~ Chris Stokes

Engineering is a fantastic base for any career. ~ Chris Liddell

Yes is what I like doing more than anything else. Somewhere along the way, as people came and went, it fell to me to kind of keep it going and oversee the spirit of the enterprise, as it were. ~ Chris Squire

Chris Hughton has been sacked by Norwich. Now? With 5 games to go? Utterly bonkers! ~ Gary Lineker

Please, let God understand why I'm doing this; and, Please, don't let there be a God if he sends all murderers to hell; and, Please, let something happen so I don't have to keep doing this. ~ Chris Dietzel

We need to take on the teachers' union once and for all. ~ Chris Christie

Jon Anderson and I, we really liked a lot of classical music, and we wanted to get some orchestral arrangements going on 'Time And A Word.' ~ Chris Squire

It's funny
sometimes the strongest individuals feel the worst when events are out of their control, and they can't really be there for the people they love. I've felt it myself. ~ Chris Kyle

The Expanded Learning Time program is a voluntary one - only districts and schools that want to apply are in the program and supported by the state to pursue their plans. ~ Chris Gabrieli

You got to control your own destiny. You got to keep writin different stuff. Keep switchin up and never do the same thin too many times. ~ Chris Tucker

Painters should shut up and paint and when we stop painting we should dance or have sex or get a massage or take a shower and we shouldn't be talking about painting. ~ Chris Martin

Dating someone on the opposite end of the happy spectrum teaches you an incredible amount of patience. ~ Chris Pine

I played in the playoffs with teams that were known for flopping and you do not get respect. ~ Chris Webber

I get along very well with Paul Ryan personally. We have very deep differences on policy issues. But we express them civilly. ~ Chris Van Hollen

Mental challenges cause an "adaptive response" to take place in the brain, just like a muscle. Challenges build axon-dendrite "transmitter-receiver" connections. Passive activities such as watching "reality" television do not stimulate or build these connections. We need to be actively involved with our activities, instead of being passive observers. Making and unmaking nerve cell connections (neuroplasticity) dictates how well the brain can handle stress. ~ Chris Hardy

I had actually finished the manuscript of 'The Wild Trees' and turned it in to Random House when all of a sudden word came. Michael Taylor and his colleague, Chris Atkins, another explorer, have just knocked one out of the park. They found the world's tallest tree. The tree is named Hyperion, 379.1 feet tall. ~ Richard Preston

I don't think there are too many rock bands in history that can look at the beginning and middle and ending of themselves and see what I see when I think of Soundgarden. I think from the beginning through the middle and the end it was such a perfect ride and such a perfect legacy to leave, ~ Chris Cornell

What is it that drives us outward to the stars above and to the shores below? Is it the security of knowing what's there? Or is it the adventure of finding it? ~ Chris Hogan

We seek to understand Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to understand ourselves. We have different explicit goals, from getting in shape, learning self-defense or competition, but tacitly we all seek mastery of ourselves. ~ Chris Matakas

The first half of fiscal 2006 has been exceptional for Cochlear. Importantly, Cochlear capitalized on a number of opportunities in this half with worldwide market share estimated to be in excess of 70%. ~ Chris Roberts

In the animal world, there are all kinds of behaviors that are binary: for example, to flee or to fight. In any evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you. ~ Chris Adami

When I think about the real pioneers of the psychedelic movement in a musical sense, not just the culture, everything had a handmade sort of vibe to it. We're inventing our culture as we move along into this. ~ Chris Robinson

There are things I'm doing with 'The After' that would've never flown on 'The X-Files' and on network television, so it's more permissive. That's not to say that you want to abuse that. I think that a show like 'The X-Files' actually worked better as a network show with the restraints put on it, the censorship that was applied. ~ Chris Carter

I have so many [on-set Glee BFFs]. I love Kevin (McHale). I love Amber (Riley); Amber and I are essentially the same person, even though one's fiercer than the other - don't tell her it's me. I love Chris Colfer, he's a gem. Melissa (Benoist) and Blake (Jenner), I love them. We're such a tight-knight family because we spend so much time together. ~ Alex Newell

The scariest film in the world is 'Rosemary's Baby.' ~ Chris Eigeman

Playing Xbox for 23 hours straight is cool and all, but I'm going to teach you how to spend time on things in your life that will get you the following two things: paid and laid. ~ Chris Hardwick

For me now, I feel that climbing is a part of who I am. It's my way of life. It's my way of expressing myself. My way of being in the world. In the past, I questioned it a lot. Now it's obvious. This is who I am. This is what I do. ~ Chris Sharma

Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career. ~ Chris Hayes