In Memoriam to Identity Quotes

“It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“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.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“Sex. You can't lie to yourself sexually. If you don't want it, it's the most disgusting thing in the world.”
― 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

“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

“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

“That night I followed him whenever he let me. I had to. Followed him into strange, complicated actions, very far, bad and good actions. But I was never allowed into his world. What was I to him? A fantasy. I gave him another identity. Whenever I lay next to him in a bed and it was night, I was too excited to fall asleep, too unwilling to lose a chance that I might be allowed to enter his life. Since he wanted fantasy, what I wanted didn’t matter. I asked myself if there was any chance he would change. No. Change for him was fantastical. Yet I was, and still am, a victim of his charity.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“Come alive, dead heart, and sing.”
― 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

“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