Top 98 Kathy Acker Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I'm what happens after death, which is writing.
Kathy Acker
#3. Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.
Kathy Acker
#4. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
Kathy Acker
#5. 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
#6. Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.
Kathy Acker
#7. I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious
Kathy Acker
#8. The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.
Kathy Acker
#9. I am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.
Kathy Acker
#10. [ ... ] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.
Kathy Acker
#11. Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who ... has constraints to heterosexual marriage, even a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home. The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.
Kathy Acker
#13. GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
Kathy Acker
#14. Education,' one of R's teachers taught, 'teaches you not to be yourself.' But who is yourself? R decided if it or he wasn't blood, it wasn't anything.
Kathy Acker
#15. 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
#16. A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.
Kathy Acker
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.
Kathy Acker
#20. Traveling around I don't think people are that horrible, I think they just don't know.
Kathy Acker
#21. But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is.
Kathy Acker
#22. I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.
Kathy Acker
#23. There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.
Kathy Acker
#25. Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.
Kathy Acker
#26. I found my voice was a reaction to all that voice stuff.
Kathy Acker
#27. 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
#28. I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.
Kathy Acker
#29. A novel is a book with a lot of pages.
Kathy Acker
#30. I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?
Kathy Acker
#31. Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.
Kathy Acker
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool.
Kathy Acker
#35. 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
#36. But now that she had achieved knighthood, and thought and acted as she wanted and decided, for one has to act in this way in order to save this world, she neither noticed nor cared that all the people around her thought she was insane.
Kathy Acker
#37. I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.
Kathy Acker
#38. I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.
Kathy Acker
#39. Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.
Kathy Acker
#40. For reason, on the one hand, signifies the idea of a free, human social life. On the other hand, reason is the court of judgment of calculation, the instrument of domination, and the means for the greatest exploitation of nature.
Kathy Acker
#41. For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.
Kathy Acker
#42. The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.
Kathy Acker
#43. What she really wanted [ ... ] was [ ... ] "to experience every emotion to the limit" so she could go beyond every limit.
Kathy Acker
#44. Women need to become literary criminals, break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.
Kathy Acker
#45. Dreams are manifestations of identities.
Kathy Acker
#46. She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.
Kathy Acker
#47. I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.
Kathy Acker
#48. 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
#49. That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.
Kathy Acker
#50. I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.
Kathy Acker
#51. IF THERE IS A GOD, GOD IS DISJUNCTION AND MADNESS.
Kathy Acker
#52. And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.
Kathy Acker
#53. There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it
Kathy Acker
#54. There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts.
Kathy Acker
#55. But : We're still human. Human because we keep on battling against all these horrors, the horrors caused and not caused by us. We battle not in order to stay alive, that would be too materalistic, for we are body and spirit, but in order to love each other.
Kathy Acker
#56. 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
#57. Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.
Kathy Acker
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. If we keep on fucking, I'm not gonna die.
Kathy Acker
#61. 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
#62. But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.
Kathy Acker
#63. 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
#64. Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.
Kathy Acker
#65. Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.
Kathy Acker
#66. There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now.
Kathy Acker
#67. 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
#68. You can't change old people. Unlike middle-aged people, they do what they want.
Kathy Acker
#69. 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
#70. One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out.
Kathy Acker
#71. I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.
Kathy Acker
#72. Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.
Kathy Acker
#73. I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.
Kathy Acker
#74. As if l was pitch black and everyone else, pastel
Kathy Acker
#75. I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.
Kathy Acker
#76. All memory can do is scream for touch.
Kathy Acker
#77. The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems.
Kathy Acker
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things.
Kathy Acker
#82. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
Kathy Acker
#83. 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
#84. 'cause humans, above all, fear intelligence. how humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts ...
Kathy Acker
#85. I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.
Kathy Acker
#86. What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?
Kathy Acker
#87. When the word ends, there'll be no more air. That's why it's important to pollute the air now.
Kathy Acker
#88. First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
Kathy Acker
#89. You can do whatever you want with my work.
Kathy Acker
#90. Some folks like trains,
some folks like ships,
I like the way you move you hips
All I want is a taste of your lips,
boy,
All I want is a taste of your lips.
Kathy Acker
#91. The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.
Kathy Acker
#92. 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
#93. Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me
Kathy Acker
#94. If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.
Kathy Acker
#95. I mean, once work's out there it's meant to be used.
Kathy Acker
#96. I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.
Kathy Acker
#97. The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.
Kathy Acker
#98. Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing.
Kathy Acker
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