quotes by 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)

"Death is another bar which lies several steps below the normal world. I'm at its threshold, but not yet in it. Its doorway id doorless."
— 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)

"...'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)

"Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies."
— Kathy Acker

"There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it."
— Kathy Acker (Pussy, King of the Pirates)

"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)

"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

"Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both."
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology: A Novel)

"Dreams are manifestations of identities."
— 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

"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)

"A novel is a book with a lot of pages."
— Kathy Acker

"What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?"
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology)

"Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me."
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology)

"If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything."
— Kathy Acker (Pussy, King of the Pirates)

"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)

"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)

"The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility."
— Kathy Acker

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

"I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent."
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology)

"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 is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts."
— 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)