Kathy Acker Quotes

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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? ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

You know I've had work banned. ~ Kathy Acker

Culture is that which falsifies. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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? ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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 ~ Kathy Acker

What I tend to tell my students is, "When you look in the mirror and see a smart, angry girl who wants to be free, you're seeing a paradigm that Kathy [Acker] helped bring into the recognizable." ~ Sarah Schulman

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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

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

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

Come alive, dead heart, and sing. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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

I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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

Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don't love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he's horrible to her, and that's what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that.

You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille's ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you're writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don't typically get with the 'whore' or the 'slut' or the sexual girl. ~ Kate Zambreno

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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

The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

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. ~ Kathy Acker

I always say, the greatest cost of leading is the cost of paving the way. ~ Kathy Giusti

I have to pay the bills just like everybody else, but it also pays my soul to work. ~ Kathy Bates

Hi flapped a hand. "Newborns. Always thinking they know everything!"
"Can you get serious for one minute?" Shelton jabbed a finger into Hi's chest, eyes jittery behind his sparkling lenses. "We've gotta find this crew and . . . and . . . I don't know. Shut 'em up. Or something."
"Unhand me, sir!" Hi brushed Shelton aside. "Although you make a good point. Well, no, actually. You make a terrible point, but it illuminates a good one. ~ Kathy Reichs

Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard to do. ~ Kathy Sierra

Why do all your brilliant ideas involve felonies? ~ Kathy Reichs

We always have a good time playing, and I'm glad it shows. ~ Kathy Valentine

You should have tried the eggplant parmesan she tried to hoist on me at the church bake sale. No wonder her children turned to Satan. He probably showed up as an angel of light and promised them a decent meal. ~ Kathy Hepinstall

I did feel very sexy and desirable. Those prisoners looked at me like no man ever did. I don't care how many people they killed. ~ Kathy Griffin

Phones are powerful at providing information. ~ Kathy Calvin

Our fight against racism should not be a matter of black and white, but good and evil. ~ Kathy McClary

I have no choice but to defend the most vulnerable among us. ~ Kathy Ireland

When silence is God's only voice,
And waiting on Him my only choice,
A banner of faith I humbly raise
And offer a sacrifice of praise.
Though answers He may not impart,
Forever I can trust His heart. ~ Kathy Herman

A smile is the solution to every problem. Even if you don't feel the happiness behind it, a smile will tell life to fuck off because you've got this. ~ Kathy Coopmans

Maybe she wanted too many things. To get closer to Nate - but to just stay friends. To make love with him - but keep her heart uninvolved. To stay with him forever - but never commit. ~ Kathy Love

I know about the torture and assassination, Detective Galiano. That's why I'm in Guatemala. ~ Kathy Reichs

But with white liberals overusing the word (racism) to influence elections because they can't effectively argue the merit of an issue is weakening a very powerful tool to push back against real acts of racism. ~ Kathy Barnette

Her hand drifted over his left nipple, and one of her fingers moved, sending lightning straight down to his groin. She was killing him, but he'd be damned if he moved one tiny inch. And if he was really, really lucky, she'd do it again. ~ Kathy Lyons

What they thought was important. I don't judge what other people do, many ... ~ Kathy Ireland

If the Nobel Prize was awarded by a woman, it would go to the inventor of the dimmer switch. ~ Kathy Lette

Their freedom to make choices means they are free to make wrong ones."
-Luke Skywalker ~ Kathy Tyers

I hope I can become a voice for all cancers and all patients. ~ Kathy Giusti

My sisters and I miss our dad dreadfully. But grief, of course, is the price of love. ~ Kathy Lette

I wore a white tank and jeans, shooting for "sexy casual." Hoping it wasn't "left farmhouse, got lost. ~ Kathy Reichs

I am in love with Larry David. ~ Kathy Griffin