Aliens & Anorexia Quotes

“The panic of altruism: sadness rests inside the body, always, nascent like the inflammation of a chronic disease.
Therefore, empathy is not a reaching outward. It is a loop. Because there isn't any separation any more between what you are and what you see.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“...remaining adolescent means rejecting all compensatory lies about one's life...”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“Crying leads you through concentric rings of sadness. You close your eyes and travel outwards through a vortex that draws you towards the saddest thing of all. And the saddest thing of all isn’t anything but sadness. It’s too big to see or name. Approaching it’s like seeing God. It makes you crazy. Because as you fall you start to feel yourself approaching someplace from which it will not be possible to retrace your steps back out — it’s much too large and ancient. There are too many parts of other people it in for one person to absorb. Grief is information.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“To feel at home in this desperate world of ours is the surest sign that one has failed to recognize it.”
― Palle Yourgrau, Aliens & Anorexia

“Maktub’ in Arabic means ‘it is written.’ Write a narrative in which the speaker starts to understand that events, as they happen in his/her life, can be seen not as surprises but as an uncovering- the systematic revelation of fate.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“...All this academic shit out there about The Body as if it were a thing apart...Anorexia arises not from narcissism, a fixation with your body, but a sense of its aloneness:...By recognizing the aloneness of your body it is possible to reach outside…, escape the predetermined world. ‘Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

“how to escape predetermination, the mechanical sign of the meal... is not an evasion of a social-gender role; it's not regression. It is an active stance: the rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food, the creation of an involuted body.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia