c_hurik > c_hurik 's Quotes

“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, In Memoriam to Identity

“TODAY I THINK MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HELL IS OVER. It was hell, the ancient hell. Hell: I believed that if I loved V enough, we would love each other.
All I know is that I’ve been returned to earth violently; I’ve a duty to myself to survive and to see what is. I have to deal with the truth, with nothing else.
Did V’s charity to me almost cause my death?
I, starving, fed on the dream that V loved me and I lived a lie. So forgive me, You who knows that only truth matters.
Yes—this dawn is at best difficult.
The blood he let out of my skin, now dried and stiff, hurts me and there’s nothing else in my life but memories of him. Mental war is constant.
Nonetheless, this is the eve before the morning.
May I accept the influxes of vigor and whatever real tenderness floats by in these barren waters. And when dawn comes, armed with my patience which burns, I shall see the cities of humans which are splendid.
The imagination is nothing unless it is made actual.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“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, In Memoriam to Identity

“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, In Memoriam to Identity

“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, In Memoriam to Identity

“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, Eurydice in the Underworld

“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, Eurydice in the Underworld

“It was as if the region were just putting the finishing touches on its seamless, corporatized hegemony, complete with just enough of a gesture of sentimental respect for the nature around it; complete with fresh, new ways of keeping the body toned and healthy; a rhetoric of inclusiveness that kept all the classes in their place; and a final transformation of the land they'd stolen from its aborigines. But at the same time, ragged marginals, fueled by deep resentment--hand in hand with savage Nature--could be plotting, perhaps even unconsciously, its violent downfall. How much I wanted to be a part of their imagined doomsday scenario!”
― Bruce Benderson, Pacific Agony

“I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
― Susan Sontag

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”
― Susan Sontag

“I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.”
― Susan Sontag

“Art is seduction, not rape. ”
― Susan Sontag

“Passion paralyzes good taste.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”
― Susan Sontag

“My ignorance is not charming.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“The really important thing is not to reject anything.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”
― Susan Sontag

“Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.”
― Susan Sontag

“It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.”
― Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you.”
― Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

“One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“It is passivity that dulls feeling.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others