Kathy Acker quotes

Kathy Acker was an influential American experimental novelist, essayist, and performance artist known for her provocative, postmodern style. Her work often explored themes of sexuality, identity, and power through unconventional narratives and techniques such as pastiche and plagiarism. She played a pivotal role in the 1980s literary underground and remains a significant figure in contemporary feminist and avant-garde literature. Here are 74 of her quotes:

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

Kathy Acker

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.

Kathy Acker

It's all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women's liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you.

Kathy Acker

We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities.

Kathy Acker

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

Kathy Acker

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.

Kathy Acker

I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.

Kathy Acker

My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer." "What's that?" "You have to find out what caused it.

Kathy Acker

All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you... You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.

Kathy Acker

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

Kathy Acker

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

Kathy Acker

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

Kathy Acker

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Kathy Acker

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

Kathy Acker

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

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

Kathy Acker

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

Kathy Acker

Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous music, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just... Who they are.

Kathy Acker

The students who come to my class are very closely related to all the evil girls who are very interested in their bodies and sex and pleasure. I learn a lot from them about how to have pleasure and how cool the female body is. One of my students had a piercing through her labia. And she told me about how when you ride on a motorcycle, the little bead on the ring acts like a vibrator. Her story turned me on so I did it. I got two. It was very cool. I'm very staid compared to my students, actually. I come from a generation where you've got the PC dykes and confused heterosexuals. No one ever told me that you could walk around with a strap-on, having orgasms.

Kathy Acker

Teach me how to talk to you. WANT. Is my wanting you so bad, wanting your cock so bad, wanting the feel of your lips on my lips just me being selfish and egoistic? Teach me a new language.

Kathy Acker

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

Kathy Acker

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

Kathy Acker