Kathy Acker Quotes

1947–1997 United States

Kathy Acker (18 April 1947 – 30 November 1997), born Karen Alexander, was an American experimental writer widely known for her controversial works that feature extreme violence, sexuality, and fetishism.

United States
20th-century poets
Authors
Essayists
Feminists

Random Kathy Acker quote

24 quotes

The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do.

Empire of the Senseless (1988)

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

Empire of the Senseless (1988)

The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.

Don Quixote (1986)

"Why are they ashamed and miserable?"
"They're repenting they're white.

Don Quixote (1986)

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.

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.

Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

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.

Bodies of Work (1996)

All these fucking models aren't working.

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.

I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.

My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer."
"What's that?"
"You have to find out what caused it."

The Gift of Disease (1996)

I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of 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 ...

The Gift of Disease (1996)

So if that little thing can do so much, who knows what else we can experience?

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.

Interview with Sylvere Lothringer (1991)

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.

Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me

Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

Writing for me is about my freedom.

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.

He's telling me, "Your agenda is ..." and I'm saying, "My agenda? I don't have an agenda and I'm not sure who I am. Who am I?"

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kathy Acker (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.