Dita Kraus Quotes

Brave people are not the ones who aren't afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That's not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk-- whose legs shake, but carry on. ~ Antonio Iturbe

Keep moving. Because the human mind is tricky. And we ought not linger in its dark places. ~ Caroline 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

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. ~ Karl Kraus

Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime. ~ Karl Kraus

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all. ~ Karl 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

Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning. ~ Karl Kraus

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics. ~ Karl Kraus

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism. ~ Karl Kraus

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know. ~ Karl 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

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots. ~ Karl Kraus

It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half. ~ Karl Kraus

How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another. ~ Karl Kraus

an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million. ~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Many share my views with me. But I don't share them with them. ~ Karl Kraus

A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good. ~ Karl Kraus

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. ~ Karl 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 want to be known by people who are knowledgeable about opera, who appreciate bel canto singing, people who have more sensitivity. ~ Alfredo Kraus

My beauty icons are women whose images are self-created. ~ Dita Von Teese

Fantasies. Indulge them at your peril. ~ Daniel Kraus

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read. ~ Karl Kraus

I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round. ~ Karl Kraus

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. ~ Karl 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

Talent is often a defect in character. ~ Karl Kraus

I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping that something might improve if I viewed allsides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and to be able to use one's prejudice as an excuse. ~ Karl Kraus

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket. ~ Karl Kraus

Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it. ~ Karl 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

In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct. ~ Karl Kraus

Set measurable goals, measure relative to competition. ~ Joe Kraus

What modern day burlesquer hasn't been influenced by Sally Rand? My own pink ostrich fans -designed by Catherine, naturally- were the largest fans on any stage in the world (even I must up the ante). They are absolutely stunning! Made with four graduated shades of pink and hundreds of rose-colored crystals, they measure seven feet across and weigh 2.3 pounds each. ~ Dita Von Teese

Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos. ~ Karl Kraus

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

Progress makes purses out of human skin. ~ Karl 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

Ah, the molasses of emotion. How it sugars the most dangerous of decisions. ~ Daniel Kraus

There are people in this home- human beings- drowning in their desire for you to look them in the eye. You made this family. And all you have to do is show up and like them. It's called 're-la-ting.' So get over whatever totally-absent-buying-your affection parenting that you received and get here, man- because this is your LIFE and you're just pissing it away! ~ Nicola 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

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match. ~ Karl Kraus

There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything. ~ Karl Kraus

I trim my opponents to fit my arrows. ~ Karl Kraus

Lord, forgive them, for they know what they do! ~ Karl Kraus