Acker, Kathy.
"The only model I found in my world was William Burroughs. He was dealing with how politics and language come together. "
Acker, Kathy.
"I feel extremely lonely and sad. I’m used to being by myself most of the time and having my own space in time. "
Acker, Kathy.
"It’s high time we talked about female sexuality, what the female body is, images of female sexuality, what women really desire. For years women have not been allowed to explore what their self-images are, what could be possible self-images, or what images of desire are. These issues are fascinating to me! "
Acker, Kathy.
"There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it"
Acker, Kathy.
"The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility."
Acker, Kathy.
"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."
Acker, Kathy.
"For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other. "
Acker, Kathy.
"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."
Acker, Kathy.
"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. ."
Acker, Kathy.
"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."
Acker, Kathy.
"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. "
Acker, Kathy.
"Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. "
Acker, Kathy.
"A novel is a book with a lot of pages."
Acker, Kathy.
"My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, “There’s only one way you can beat your cancer.” “What is that?” “You have to find out what caused it.” "
Acker, Kathy. The Gift of Disease. 1996.
"The hardest part of my cancer was the walking away from that surgeon and from conventional medicine. Belief in conventional medicine, in what our doctors tell us is so deeply engrained in our society that to walk away from conventional medicine is to walk away from normal society. "
Acker, Kathy. The Gift of Disease. 1996.
"I had been confused why I had gotten cancer. Three weeks later, I saw the network of causation so clearly I wondered why I wasn’t more disease-riddled. My healer reminded me that if health is based on forgiveness, then I had to forgive… "
Acker, Kathy. The Gift of Disease. 1996.
"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."
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts. "
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"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."
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"Dreams are manifestations of identities"
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it."
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed."
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"...'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..."
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"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. "
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. 1996.
"He lifted me upward, up above his head, fingers in both cunt and asshole so now I was his vase, he the thorns, and throwing the case over his shoulder so that it broke on the floor, continued to bring me to orgasm again, finger moved in labyrinths of violence. Always this is how I am captured. "
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: A Demenology. 1993.
"Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me."
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: Demenology.1993.
"What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?"
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: Demenology.1993.
"I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent."
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: Demenology.1993.
"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."
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: Demenology. 1993.
"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"
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: Demenology. 1993.
"Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both."
Acker, Kathy. My Mother: Demenology. 1993.
"At a certain point I realized that the “I” doesn’t exist. So I said to myself: if the “I” doesn’t exist, I have to construct one, or maybe even more than one. "
Acker, Kathy. Interview with Svlvere Lothringer. 1991.
"You create identity, you’re not given identity per se. What became more and more interesting to me wasn’t the “I”, it was the text because it’s text that create identity. That’s how I got interested in plagiarism. "
Acker, Kathy. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. 1991.
"I came out of the poetry world of America. Specifically, I was taught by the second generation of the Black Mountain poets and by Jackson Maclow who was a crossover between the group and Fluxus. Among the many lessons I had learned by the time I was in my early twenties was a practical one: poets never make money and are, as both Rimbaud and Patti Smith said, the white niggers of this earth. "
Acker, Kathy. Young Lust. 1988.
"The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. "
Acker, Kathy. “Elegy for the World of the Fathers, Part I, Rape by the Father” Empire of the Senseless . 1988.
"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 materialistic, for we are body and spirit, but in order to love each other."
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. 1988.
"Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectural 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."
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. 1988.
"Even a woman who has a soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who (…) has constraints to heterosexual marriage, even a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home. The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don’t fit in. "
Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. 1986.
"Don Quixote decided that the only thing’s to be happy. Since the sole reason she ever went out of her house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy’s to fuck. She was riding her horse along, in order to find sex that wouldn’t hurt too much. At this point she saw three or four hundred men. “My God”, she said, “how full of air they are!” She turned to her dog. “Fortune is guiding our affairs beyond our most hopeful expectations. Here’re those giants I’ve been looking for.” "
Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. 1986.
"It’s all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. There 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. "
Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. 1986.
"What else is this about? I’m no superstar shit and never will be. If anything, I’m what happens after death, which is writing. "
Acker, Kathy. Kathy Acker by Mark Magill BOMB 6/Summer 1983. 1983.
"Janey: For 2000 years, you’ve had the nerve to tell women who we are. We use your words; we eat your food. Every way we get money has to be a crime. We are plagiarists, liars and criminals. "
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978.
"I am as closed-up and fucked0up as everybody else. I am hell. The world is hell. “No, it isn’t”, I scream, but I know it is. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Help. Help me. Love me. "
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978.
"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 egotistic? Teach me a new language. "
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978.
"Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else. "
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978.
"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."
Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work: Essays 1978.
"Intense sexual desire is the greatest thing in the world. Janey dreams of cocks. Janey dreams of cocks instead of objects. Janey has to fuck. This is the way sex drives Janey crazy. Before Janey fucks, she keeps her wants in cells. As soon as Janey is fucking, she wants to be adored as much as possible, at the same time as its other extreme: ignored as much as possible. More than this: Janey can no longer perceive herself wanting: Janey is want. "
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978.
"Abortions are the symbol, the outer image, or sexual relationship in this world. Describing my abortions is the only real way I can tell you about pain and fear. "
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978.
"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. "
Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work: Essays 1978.
