Kathy Acker > Quotes

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”
― Kathy Acker

“Dreams are manifestations of identities.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“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

“There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.”
― 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, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”
― Kathy Acker, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

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

“i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“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

“I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“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

“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, Eurydice in the Underworld

“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, Empire of the Senseless

“There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it”
― Kathy Acker

“It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“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, My Mother: Demonology

“A novel is a book with a lot of pages.”
― 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, Bodies of Work: Essays

“The part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious'. Since it's free of control, it's our only defense against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.

Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.

But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.

What is the language of the 'unconcious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of language or languages that are which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes.”
― Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

“I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“...'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, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“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.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“[...] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“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, In Memoriam to Identity