Chris Kraus Quotes & Sayings

No one ... can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people. — Chris Kraus

I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education - a — Chris Kraus

It was April the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell — Chris Kraus

Leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language when you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shut down is the only way back in. — Chris Kraus

Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. — Chris Kraus

Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality. — Chris Kraus

They dug each other's references and felt smarter in each other's presence. — Chris Kraus

If women have failed to make "universal" art because we're trapped within the "personal," why not universalize the "personal" and make it the subject of our art? — Chris Kraus

The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty. — Chris Kraus

We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone. — Chris Kraus

There's a lot of madness in New Zealand because it's a mean and isolated little country. Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely. — Chris Kraus

The message is, IT'S GETTING LATE. Be glad you're in a California art school but don't forget you live by compromise and contradiction cause those who don't just die like dogs. — Chris Kraus

Perhaps not passionate but comfortable. We could have gone on like that forever and then you came, the rambling man, with all these expatriate philosophies that we've outgrown ourselves over the past 20 years. This is really not our problem, Dick. You're leading a ghost town life, infecting everyone who comes near you with a ghost disease. Take it back, Dick. We don't need it. — Chris Kraus

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out. — Chris Kraus

Art supercedes what's personal. — Chris Kraus

Why do people think that we're degraded when we're examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation? — Chris Kraus

Study's good, because it microcosms everything - if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything's separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down. — Chris Kraus

According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader". — Chris Kraus

You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn't witnessing contain complicity? "You think too much," is what they always said when their curiosity ran out. — Chris Kraus

There were some low moments out there on the road tonight - abandonment and what's the point? - but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night. — Chris Kraus

Because the world itself is now unfathomable, the only complexities that really count are small moments of domestic life that combine to trigger deep emotion. There is no longer any way of being poor in any interesting way in major cities like Manhattan — Chris Kraus

Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender? — Chris Kraus

I'm thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss - a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more. — Chris Kraus

Dear Dick, I'm wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the '70s has been read only as "collaborative" and "feminist. — Chris Kraus

Two hours ago I took a break from writing this to take a walk before the sun went down. I had an urge to play Willie Nelson's "Crazy" on the Red Hot Country CD before going out, but didn't. When I turned the bend on 49th Terrace, my usual walk, Crazy sung by Patsy Cline was pouring, I mean POURING, out the windows of a house. I leaned back against a fence across the street and watched the house lift off. An operatic, cinematic moment, everything locked into a single frame that gets you high. Like You I'm Trapped. — Chris Kraus

Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense. — Chris Kraus

Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn't lack. It's surplus energy- a claustrophobia inside your skin - — Chris Kraus

You shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you're a portable saint. Knowing you is like knowing Jesus. There are billions of us and only one of you so I don't expect much from you personally. There are no answers to my life. But I'm touched by you and fulfilled just by believing. — Chris Kraus

Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, ... panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut. — Chris Kraus

No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. — Chris Kraus

Last week at school Pam Struger wondered why the brilliant girls all die. — Chris Kraus

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet's last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn't the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? — Chris Kraus

Dear Dick, I wrote in one of many letters, what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it's least described — Chris Kraus

Remaining adolescent means rejecting all compensatory lies about one's life ... — Chris Kraus

Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world. — Chris Kraus

Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind, I said, 20 percent had to come from you. You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication. — Chris Kraus

You're aware there are things you once valued and were proud of in yourself, but they exist at a remove now, because they're overwhelmed by the question of whether they would be good and acceptable to him. Morality, ambition, desire, pleasure all take a backseat to, What would he think of this, and how shall I describe it to him? All you care about is maximizing his impression of you. — Chris Kraus

If I can't make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering 'Would he like me?', I wonder 'Is he game?' When — Chris Kraus

It's going to be crazy. All eight teams here are good teams. Hopefully the atmosphere will be great because it's going to be great basketball. — Chris Kraus

I found the second story that I'd ever written, 20 years ago in Wellington. It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don't think anyone will listen. — Chris Kraus

Remembering what it felt like to be 20 overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words. — Chris Kraus

It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind. — Chris Kraus