Performative Quotes

#1. The last time I had this much fun was a root-canal operation.

Larry Ziegler

#2. ...the performative online biliousness that has come to be known as trolling...

Glen Weldon

#3. Most actors and actresses are performative as people.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#4. Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.

Marian Keyes

#5. For me, in some ways, my whole life is a bit performative and always has been - because I'm stared at and looked at everywhere I go.

Stella Young

#6. I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

David Shields

#7. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.

Ben Aaronovitch

#8. Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

Anne Enright

#9. The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness.

Okwui Enwezor

#10. Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

David Foster Wallace

#11. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

Judith Butler

#12. You are more than entitled not to know what the word 'performative' means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it doesnot mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word.

J.L. Austin

#13. Power is performative in every one of its hydra-headed forms.

Jeffrey Alexander

#14. I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.

Irvine Welsh

#15. I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

David Byrne

#16. Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.

Robert Pinsky

#17. The angriest person in a controversy is the one most liable to be in the wrong.

John Tillotson

#18. I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was ... appalling ... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.

Laura Wade

#19. Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

Denise Duhamel

#20. Allah always gives you signs, when you are with Him, that He is with you.

Malcolm X

#21. So capital is in fact borderless; that's the problem. On the other hand capital has to keep borders alive in order for this kind of cross-border trade to happen. So therefore the idea of borderlessness has a performative contradiction within it which has to be kept alive.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

#22. We-skepticism displaces the performative component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with suspicion and p1ivileges a fantasy of individual singularity and autonomy. I write "we" hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity.

Anonymous

#23. I've got a lot of energy at my shows, I'm very performative; that gave me the idea, I want to try to translate that into a musical project, having the same energy I have onstage and on my album.

Lunice

#24. Roses are red / Gender is performative / Mass-market romance / Is heteronormative

Stefanie Gray

#25. My whole background was with bands, so I always thought of "fashion" as performative. It took me a long time to bridge the gap between my music and what I was studying in school, [which was] dance and being a performer.

Le1f

#26. It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.

Darin Strauss