Kathy Acker Quotes

I'm what happens after death, which is writing.

Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.

Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectural mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return.

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.

GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

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.

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.

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.

You can't change old people. Unlike middle-aged people, they do what they want.

The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.

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 Im not so censored when I use dream material.

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.

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.

'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.

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.

If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

Thats what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come up upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body.

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

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.

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems.

You know I've had work banned.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.

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.

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.

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.

I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.

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

But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.

Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.

There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

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.

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

Culture is that which falsifies.

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.