Chris Kraus

“It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.”

“As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.”

“Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality.”

“There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what’s the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.”

“No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.”

“If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?”

“S: But Chris, I think his embarrassment isn't in relation to you or me but to himself. What can he do?C: I hate being thrown into such a physical state.S: Isn't that experiencing life to the hilt?C: No, it's just a dumb infatuation. I'm so ashamed.S: But even if his silence hurts you, isn't that what attracted you to him? The fact that he was inaccessible. So, I think there is a contradiction there, at least nothing to feel ashamed of -.”

“Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

“Anyone who feels to much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.”

“What's the matter?" you asked, seizing an idea. "Did I burst your balloon - destroy the fantasy?"I struggled for a way to answer this without my clothes.... Well his was very cruel, but loving you'd become a full-time job and I wasn't ready to be unemployed.”

“Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.”

“...to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you've ever had.”

“Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.”

“So don't be too fast to attribute yourself with miraculous sexual powers, The Christ of Love. Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and in all fairness, You owe us everything. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly powerful icon of erotic integrity.”

“All acts of sex were forms of degradation.... What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?”

“When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.”

“[Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.”

“Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it's neuroticised and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?”

“Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.”

“If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.”