Kathy Acker Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Kathy Acker
For 2.000 years, you've had the nerve to tell women who we are. We use your words; we eat your food. Every way we get money has to be a crime. We are plagiarists, liars and criminals.

Kathy Acker
The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

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

Kathy Acker
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.

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

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

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

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
Teach me how to talk to you. WANT. Is my wanting you so bad, wanting your cock so bad, wanting the feel of your lips on my lips just me being selfish and egoistic? Teach me a new language.

Kathy Acker
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...

Kathy Acker
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.

Kathy Acker
I am as closed-up and fucked-up as everybody else. I am hell. The world is hell. "No, it isn't", I scream, but I know it is. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Help. Help me. Help me. Love me.

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

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
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