Chris Kraus > Quotes

“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, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“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

“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, I Love Dick

“When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else's presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“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 Love Dick

“Anyone who feels to much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.”
― Chris Kraus

“Remembering what it felt like to be 20 overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.
... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“The panic of altruism: sadness rests inside the body, always, nascent like the inflammation of a chronic disease.
Therefore, empathy is not a reaching outward. It is a loop. Because there isn't any separation any more between what you are and what you see.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“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. Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“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, Torpor

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

“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, Aliens & Anorexia

“The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“... 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

“We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Oh Dick, you eroticise what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“And isn’t every letter a love letter?”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“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, I Love Dick

“Who gets to speak and why?, I wrote last week, is the only question.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick