1.
We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities.
Kathy Acker
3.
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
4.
Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefer loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such 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
5.
GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
Kathy Acker
6.
If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.
Kathy Acker
7.
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
8.
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
9.
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
10.
There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.
Kathy Acker
12.
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
13.
I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.
Kathy Acker
14.
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
15.
A novel is a book with a lot of pages.
Kathy Acker
16.
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
17.
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
18.
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.
Kathy Acker
19.
I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.
Kathy Acker
20.
Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.
Kathy Acker
21.
The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.
Kathy Acker
22.
'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
23.
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
24.
I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.
Kathy Acker
25.
I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.
Kathy Acker
26.
The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.
Kathy Acker
27.
Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.
Kathy Acker
28.
All memory can do is scream for touch.
Kathy Acker
29.
I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.
Kathy Acker
30.
I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.
Kathy Acker
31.
There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it
Kathy Acker
32.
One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.
Kathy Acker
33.
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
34.
I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.
Kathy Acker
35.
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
36.
First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
Kathy Acker
37.
Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
Kathy Acker
38.
I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.
Kathy Acker
39.
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
40.
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
41.
Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.
Kathy Acker
42.
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
43.
A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.
Kathy Acker
44.
And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.
Kathy Acker
45.
You know I've had work banned.
Kathy Acker
46.
Culture is that which falsifies.
Kathy Acker
47.
The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.
Kathy Acker
48.
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
49.
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
50.
Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.
Kathy Acker