Kathy Acker

“IF THERE IS A GOD, GOD IS DISJUNCTION AND MADNESS.”

“Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Heart disease syphilis pregnancyAll you creeps on the street get away from me”

“In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”

“Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“Dreams are manifestations of identities.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.”

“...'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...”

“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.”