Kathy Acker
poet, novelist, writer, university teacher, essayist, comics writer, performance artist, prose writer, playwright
Read on Wikipedia1947 – 1997
All Quotes by 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.”
“Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.”
“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.”
“In the total devastation of the heart which is the world, the lands-lords rule. There is no way we can defeat the landslords. But under their reins and their watchful eyes.I sail as the winds of lusts and emotions bare me. Everywhere and anywhere. I who will never own, whatever and whenever I want, I take.”
“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.”
“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. Anywhere. Is it for you, freaks, my loves, I am writing and it is about you.”
“You create identity, you're not given identity per se. What became more interesting to me wasn't the I, it was text because it's texts that create the identity. That's how I got interested in plagiarism.”
“At a certain point I realized that the "I" doesn't exist. So I said to myself: If the "I" doesn't exist, I have to construct one, or maybe even more than one.”
“My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer." "You have to find out what caused it."”
“I had been confused why I had gotten cancer. Three weeks later, I saw the network of causation so clearly I wondered why I wasn't more disease-riddled. My healer reminded me that if health is based on forgiveness, then I had to forgive ...”
“Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet.”
“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.”
“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.”
“"Why are they ashamed and miserable?"Don Quixote finally refused the dogs' attack on her attack: "Liberalism has never stopped me from doing anything", said the knight.”
“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.”