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, Pussy, King of the Pirates

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

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

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

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

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

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

“A novel is a book with a lot of pages.”
― Kathy Acker

“...'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

“Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“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 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

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

“There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical 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

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

“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

“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

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

“Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectual mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return.”
― Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

“The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.”
― Kathy Acker

“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

“Since Pussy never had thought, nor would she think, that women shouldn't have abortions, she had to come to terms with the realization that to be human, and woman, includes the possibility and even the act of murder.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“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

“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, My Mother: Demonology

“For reason, on the one hand, signifies the idea of a free, human social life. On the other hand, reason is the court of judgment of calculation, the instrument of domination, and the means for the greatest exploitation of nature.”
― Kathy Acker, Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream

“They had not, under the heavens and on earth, one single weapon. They don't control the land they live on, the schools which train them, the heat and food their bodies need to live through the winter's cold, the media which gives them language, the military weapons for which they give most of their money. There is no more time in this city. Reasonable people don't let themselves dream because no dream can be true. They have a cry that bought them back to first causes: But we who have no mothers, no fathers, no homes or love. Where are we going to run?”
― Kathy Acker, Literal Madness

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