Kathy Acker Quotes

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

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

~ Kathy Acker

She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.

~ 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

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'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

INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLDJaney 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

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

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

~ Kathy Acker

Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.

~ Kathy Acker

Every angel is terrifying.Through the darkness, they move silently...I will go down into death with you.I must go where I must goTo see what I must seeIn that place where no one knows...... This is where love is taking me.You have been leadingMe, angels, in and out of death.I have no idea who you are.Eurydice. Is she nothingOr is she your mirror?I don't know anymore.I am at war.Perhaps that which is given - Being human - Is too hard,And so it is love that brings us,To what cannot be born,To ourselves,And so we must change,Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.Lovers disappear in each other.Do they disappear forever?Where do they go?

~ 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

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

~ Kathy Acker

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?

~ 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

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

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

~ Kathy Acker

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.

~ Kathy Acker

There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.

~ Kathy Acker

I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.

~ Kathy Acker