Wojnarowicz Quotes

#1. I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Barry McGee

#2. There needs to be more Kander & Ebbs and Rodgers & Harts and people like that out there. But, it's so hard to get something looked at and on.

Ruthie Henshall

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

David Wojnarowicz

#7. Time and death shall depart and say in flying
Love has found out a way to live, by dying.

John Dryden

#8. They say the first World Series is the one you remember most. No, no no. I guarantee you don't remember that one because the fantasy world you always dreamed about is suddenly real.

Sparky Anderson

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

David Wojnarowicz

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

David Wojnarowicz

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

David Wojnarowicz

#12. Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

William James

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

David Wojnarowicz

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

David Wojnarowicz

#15. 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

#16. Getting into the character is difficult and letting go of your life and the things that kind of define you, whatever it is in life that's your daily routine because you sort of find yourself in this other life and that's difficult and the other end is difficult.

Joaquin Phoenix

#17. The best things in life don't come in adult sizes.

Matt Bird

#18. Always inflation comes gradually; is recognized too late; and can be cured only by ruthless political surgery, which, if delayed too long, proves futile ...

Theodore White

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Ooh baby, baby, it's a wild world, it's hard just to get by upon a smile.

Cat Stevens