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

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

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

A novel is a book with a lot of pages. — 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

People say, 'You look like the girl who used to be on that show 'Angel' - they don't actually think I'm her. — Amy Acker

Since Pussy never had thought, nor would she think, that women shouldn't have abortions, she had to come to terms with the realization that to be human, and woman, includes the possibility and even the act of murder. — 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

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season. — Amy Acker

It's never too late to right a wrong. — Emily Acker

There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it — 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

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies. — Kathy Acker

They had not, under the heavens and on earth, one single weapon. They don't control the land they live on, the schools which train them, the heat and food their bodies need to live through the winter's cold, the media which gives them language, the military weapons for which they give most of their money. There is no more time in this city. Reasonable people don't let themselves dream because no dream can be true. They have a cry that bought them back to first causes: But we who have no mothers, no fathers, no homes or love. Where are we going to run? — 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

Because I've done so many hour dramas, people tend to think of you as more of a dramatic actor and don't see you as doing comedy. — Amy Acker

Usually when people see me, they see me as more of the soft-spoken one rather than being the witty, smart-tongued character. — Amy 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreams are manifestations of identities. — Kathy Acker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture is that which falsifies. — 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

If we keep on fucking, I'm not gonna die. — Kathy Acker

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

Finally, while I don't want to disparage the traditional novel--I still prefer Dickens's Great Expectations over Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, though I'll take Lauren Fairbanks's Sister Carrie over Dreiser's any day--there's a whole other world of novels out there most people never even hear of, much less read. Let's go see. — Steven Moore

Genre stuff is the most exciting stuff for an actor to play. I get to try new things, do things I would have never got the chance to do. — Amy Acker

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

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

I've always been obsessed with Audrey Hepburn. — Amy Acker

IF THERE IS A GOD, GOD IS DISJUNCTION AND MADNESS. — Kathy Acker

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

Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut. — Drew Van 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

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

pod. You mean nothing to me. And NOTHING you do now can hurt me! I hate you. — Elizabeth Acker

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

As long as you're still alive, you always have the chance to start again. — Emily 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

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale. — David Foster Wallace

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

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

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

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

Doing Much Ado was such a special thing because I knew everybody involved. With people you hadn't worked with before, you would watch them on shows and want to work with them. — Amy 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

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

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

I'm still blowing alright, and I still enjoy it which is the main thing. — Acker Bilk

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

I look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what's going to come out of there tonight? You never know. — Acker Bilk

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