David Wojnarowicz Quotes

#1. Bottom line, if people don't say what they believe, those ideas and feelings get lost. If they are lost often enough, those ideas and feelings never return.

David Wojnarowicz

#2. I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.

David Wojnarowicz

#3. All of my life I've made things that are like fragmented mirrors of what I perceive to be the world. As far as I'm concerned the fact that in 1990 the human body is still a taboo subject is unbelievably ridiculous. What exactly is frightening about the human body?

David Wojnarowicz

#4. I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions.

David Wojnarowicz

#5. What I feel is the momentary shock of realizing that most of the wood, metal and plastic fixtures, the sinks, lampshades, the shower stall, and even the drinking cups will all outlive me if my body follows the same progression that this tiny invisible-to-the-eye virus has initiated.

David Wojnarowicz

#6. I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.

David Wojnarowicz

#7. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

#8. Feeling animalistic. Feeling Hyena. Feeling Wolf. Feeling Dog. I am tongue and heart.

David Wojnarowicz

#9. I'll never shake the hand of someone I might be fighting against in wartime.

David Wojnarowicz

#10. My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.

David Wojnarowicz

#11. History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.

David Wojnarowicz

#12. I'm looking for a path out of the emptiness but all I see is the great wide earth in various formations.

David Wojnarowicz

#13. I've been in rage all my life at this thing we call 'society'

David Wojnarowicz

#14. Darkness has completely descended onto the landscape and I stood up and stretched my arms above my head and I wondered what it would be like if it were a perfect world. Only god knows. And he is dead.

David Wojnarowicz

#15. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.

David Wojnarowicz

#16. To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.

David Wojnarowicz