Chris Kraus

“It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.”

“When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.”

“Dear Dick, I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your "fragility", but I'm not sure that I agree. There's nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It's a "problem" you're confronting all the time. I'm just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave... And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we've been through.”

“Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. ("Complicity is like a girl's name," writes Dodie Bellamy).”

“Oh Dick, you eroticise what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.”

“We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?”

“Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?”

“Dear Dick, I guess it's been a case of infatuation... Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone.... Whereas the sex-infatuations that's male *you, Shake, the priest) leap out of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it's like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating under the surface. Wanting sex to realise things I knew.”

“Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies.”