Kathy Acker Quotes & Sayings

I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it. — Kathy Acker

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

When I returned, not to Berlin, but to Hamburg in the midst of the fog of the beginning of winter, to the road that runs right above it's river and docks, a castle which never existed and a fountain which is really a sewer, a gust of wind far sweeter and more fragrant than any red rose carried the smell of shit and floating soil like a tongue into my nostril. — Kathy Acker

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing. — Kathy Acker

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

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

The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems. — Kathy Acker

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

All memory can do is scream for touch. — Kathy Acker

There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts. — Kathy Acker

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

When the word ends, there'll be no more air. That's why it's important to pollute the air now. — Kathy Acker

There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now. — Kathy Acker

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who ... has constraints to heterosexual marriage, even 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

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

I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing
writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like. — Kathy Acker

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

Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing. — Kathy Acker

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

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

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

One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out. — Kathy Acker

Some folks like trains,
some folks like ships,

I like the way you move you hips
All I want is a taste of your lips,
boy,
All I want is a taste of your lips. — Kathy Acker

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

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

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way. — Kathy Acker

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

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

For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other. — Kathy Acker

We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things. — Kathy Acker

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

Culture is that which falsifies. — Kathy Acker

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility. — Kathy Acker

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it. — Kathy Acker

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

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

Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both. — Kathy Acker

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation. — Kathy Acker

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

Come alive, dead heart, and sing. — Kathy Acker

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. — Kathy Acker

Dreams are manifestations of identities. — Kathy Acker

I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious — Kathy Acker

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

I mean, once work's out there it's meant to be used. — Kathy Acker

'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

[ ... ] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced. — Kathy Acker

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

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

You know I've had work banned. — Kathy Acker

TODAY I THINK MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HELL IS OVER. It was hell, the ancient hell. Hell: I believed that if I loved V enough, we would love each other.
All I know is that I've been returned to earth violently; I've a duty to myself to survive and to see what is. I have to deal with the truth, with nothing else.
Did V's charity to me almost cause my death?
I, starving, fed on the dream that V loved me and I lived a lie. So forgive me, You who knows that only truth matters.
Yes - this dawn is at best difficult.
The blood he let out of my skin, now dried and stiff, hurts me and there's nothing else in my life but memories of him. Mental war is constant.
Nonetheless, this is the eve before the morning.
May I accept the influxes of vigor and whatever real tenderness floats by in these barren waters. And when dawn comes, armed with my patience which burns, I shall see the cities of humans which are splendid.
The imagination is nothing unless it is made actual. — Kathy Acker

I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for hours. All land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it's becoming harder to get off the roads. — Kathy Acker

What she really wanted [ ... ] was [ ... ] "to experience every emotion to the limit" so she could go beyond every limit. — Kathy Acker

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have. — Kathy Acker

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. — Kathy Acker

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

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive. — Kathy Acker

Education,' one of R's teachers taught, 'teaches you not to be yourself.' But who is yourself? R decided if it or he wasn't blood, it wasn't anything. — Kathy Acker

But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is. — Kathy Acker

If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters. — Kathy Acker

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

For reason, on the one hand, signifies the idea of a free, human social life. On the other hand, reason is the court of judgment of calculation, the instrument of domination, and the means for the greatest exploitation of nature. — Kathy Acker

This is the story of V and me.
Look. Each person has the possibilities of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives. The good family man doesn't have a sense of responsibility. Simultaneously, he's my angel. Simultaneously, his family's a pack of incontinent dogs. In front of men such as him who believe they're respectable, I love to talk about who they really are, the people they don't want to know and socially and politically chastise. Look. I have loved and worshiped a pig.
This society hates and locks up its madness because they hate and lock up themselves. I know the system of schizophrenia. Nevertheless I loved a pig and couldn't stop. — Kathy Acker

Women need to become literary criminals, break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives. — Kathy Acker

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. — Kathy Acker

The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense. — Kathy Acker

INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
Janey dreams of cocks. Janey sees cocks instead of objects. Janey has to fuck.
This is the way Sex drives Janey crazy: Before Janey fucks, she keeps her wants in cells. As soon as Janey's fucking she wants to be adored as much as possible at the same time as, its other extreme, ignored as much as possible. More than this: Janey can no longer perceive herself wanting. Janey is Want.
It's worse than this: If Janey gets sexually rejected her body becomes sick. If she doesn't get who she wants she naturally revolts. — Kathy Acker

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

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 — Kathy Acker

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

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

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 I'm not so censored when I use dream material. — Kathy Acker

Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me — Kathy Acker

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist? — Kathy Acker

And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool. — Kathy Acker

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

I am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed. — Kathy Acker

Sometimes I forget this insoluble mess and dream: he'll save me, we'll travel; we'll hunt in the deserts, we'll sleep on the pavements of strange cities, carelessly, without his guilt, without my pain. Or else I'm going to wake up and all the human laws and customs of this world will have changed - thanks to some magical power - or this world, without changing, will let me feel desire and be happy and carefree.
What did I want from him who hurt me more than I thought it was possible for two people to hurt each other? I wanted the adventures found in kids' books. He couldn't give me these because he wasn't able to. Whatever did he want from me? I never understood. He told me he was just average: average regrets, average hopes. What do I care about all that average shit that has nothing to do with adventure? — Kathy Acker

She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats. — Kathy Acker

All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you ... You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy. — Kathy Acker

Eurydice sits alone on a red bed. She has flaming red hair, so flaming that you can't see anything else of her, much less anything else around her.
She takes up too much space. Also she's mad. Which has nothing to do with anything. She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers. — Kathy Acker

As if l was pitch black and everyone else, pastel — Kathy Acker

I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever. — Kathy Acker

I found my voice was a reaction to all that voice stuff. — Kathy Acker

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other. — Kathy Acker

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

That night I followed him whenever he let me. I had to. Followed him into strange, complicated actions, very far, bad and good actions. But I was never allowed into his world. What was I to him? A fantasy. I gave him another identity. Whenever I lay next to him in a bed and it was night, I was too excited to fall asleep, too unwilling to lose a chance that I might be allowed to enter his life. Since he wanted fantasy, what I wanted didn't matter. I asked myself if there was any chance he would change. No. Change for him was fantastical. Yet I was, and still am, a victim of his charity. — Kathy Acker

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me. — Kathy Acker

I found out and lost the only place I ever sort of regarded as home. Oh well. Best to stay in one's garden but Voltaire was a boring writer and sex is one of the greatest things there is. — Kathy Acker

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

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

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

Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectual 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. — Kathy Acker

R wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and about what he, R, wanted:
My friend,
You're eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don't miss Charleville. I don't miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings're being dried up: dead pig Delahaye.
Emotions are the movers of this world.
Me: I'm thirsty. What I'm thirsty for - whom I'm thirsty for - I can't get so I drink poisons. I've got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh - for more poisons. Maybe more poisons'll come and I'll go so far, I'll emerge. Something is trying to emerge from this mess.
I don't know how. — Kathy Acker

Every angel is terrifying.
Through the darkness, they move silently...

I will go down into death with you.
I must go where I must go
To see what I must see
In that place where no one knows...

... This is where love is taking me.

You have been leading
Me, angels, in and out of death.
I have no idea who you are.
Eurydice. Is she nothing
Or is she your mirror?
I don't know anymore.
I am at war.
Perhaps that which is given -
Being human -
Is too hard,
And so it is love that brings us,
To what cannot be born,
To ourselves,
And so we must change,
Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.

Lovers disappear in each other.
Do they disappear forever?
Where do they go? — Kathy Acker

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating. — Kathy Acker

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

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party. — Kathy Acker

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds? — Kathy Acker

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