Top 35 Chris Kraus Quotes
#1. Last week at school Pam Struger wondered why the brilliant girls all die.
Chris Kraus
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Remaining adolescent means rejecting all compensatory lies about one's life ...
Chris Kraus
#5. No one ... can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
Chris Kraus
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?
Chris Kraus
#11. Remembering what it felt like to be 20 overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words.
Chris Kraus
#13. If women have failed to make "universal" art because we're trapped within the "personal," why not universalize the "personal" and make it the subject of our art?
Chris Kraus
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn't lack. It's surplus energy- a claustrophobia inside your skin -
Chris Kraus
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".
Chris Kraus
#21. 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
#22. We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.
Chris Kraus
#23. 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
#24. The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty.
Chris Kraus
#25. 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
#26. Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality.
Chris Kraus
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. You shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you're a portable saint. Knowing you is like knowing Jesus. There are billions of us and only one of you so I don't expect much from you personally. There are no answers to my life. But I'm touched by you and fulfilled just by believing.
Chris Kraus
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education - a
Chris Kraus
#34. They dug each other's references and felt smarter in each other's presence.
Chris Kraus
#35. 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
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