“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.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“You shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you’re a portable saint. Knowing you is like knowing Jesus. There are billions of us and only one of you so I don’t expect much from you personally. There are no answers to my life. But I’m touched by you and fulfilled just by believing.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“It was April the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Remembering what it felt like to be 20 overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“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.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“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.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn’t witnessing contain complicity? “You think too much,” is what they always said when their curiosity ran out.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“They dug each other’s references and felt smarter in each other’s presence.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“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.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the ’70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“You're aware there are things you once valued and were proud of in yourself, but they exist at a remove now, because they're overwhelmed by the question of whether they would be good and acceptable to him. Morality, ambition, desire, pleasure all take a backseat to, What would he think of this, and how shall I describe it to him? All you care about is maximizing his impression of you.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“My entire state of being's changed because I'v become my sexuality: female, straight, wanting to love men, be fucked. Is there a way of living with this like a gay person, proudly? (p. 186)”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Who gets to speak and why?, I wrote last week, is the only question.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“I’m thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—“a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“But even so I can't stop writing even for a day--I'm doing it to save my life. These letters're the first time I've ever tried to talk about ideas because I need to, not just to amuse or entertain.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“She hardly slept or ate, she forgot to comb her hair. The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty. People were afraid of her; she forgot how to teach her classes. She became that word that people use to render difficult or driven women weightless: Gabi Teisch was "quirky.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“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.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don’t think anyone will listen.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“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.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
Chris Kraus
Born place: New York City, New York, The United States
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“I thought Dee was full of shit when she mentioned all that party you are rocking in your pants.” He laughs and wags his brows at me.”
― Harper Sloan, quote from Uncaged
“They'll uncouple easily enough," Omar said dryly.
"You're wrong" Rafe met the man's one-eyed gaze head on.
My heart slowed. What was he doing?
Omar snorted. "You'll forget her in a week."
"Not a chance. I've loved her since I was ten, long before we even met"...
"So if you try to take her from me," Rafe went on lightly, though his eyes had a dangerous gleam, "I will stick a steel knife in your happily ever after and gouge out its guts”
― Kat Falls, quote from Inhuman
“The Writer's Oath
I promise solemnly:
1. to write as often and as much as I can,
2. to respect my writing self, and
3. to nurture the writing of others.
I accept these responsibilities and shall honor them always.”
― Gail Carson Levine, quote from Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly
“«Es necesario acostumbrarse a la idea de que 'tiempo' es un concepto relativo, y que propiamente tiene que ser completado por el concepto de una pleromática existencia 'simultánea' o 'bárdica' de todos los acontecimientos históricos. Lo que existe en el pléroma como 'acontecimiento' eterno, aparece en el tiempo como secuencia aperiódica, es decir, se repite varias veces de modo irregular.»”
― C.G. Jung, quote from Answer to Job
“But the manner of giving voice to thoughts and feelings becomes particularly significant in the case of negative feelings or doubts about a relationship. The difference was highlighted for me when a fifty-year-old divorced man told me about his experiences in forming new relationships with women. On this matter, he was clear: "I do not value my fleeting thoughts, and I do not value the fleeting thoughts of others." He felt that the relationship he was currently in had been endangered, even permanently weakened, by the woman's practice of tossing out her passing thoughts, because, early in their courtship, many of her thoughts were fears about the relationship. Not surprisingly, since they did not yet know each other well, she worried about whether she could trust him, whether their relationship would destroy her independence, whether this relationship was really right for her. He felt she should have kept these fears and doubts to herself and waited to see how things turned out.
As it happens, things turned out well. The woman decided that the relationship was right for her, she could trust him, and she did not have to give up her independence. But he felt, at the time that he told me of this, that he had still not recovered from the wear and tear of coping with her earlier doubts. As he put it, he was still dizzy from having been bounced around like a yo-yo tied to the string of her stream of consciousness.
In contrast, the man admitted, he himself goes to the other extreme: he never expresses his fears or misgivings about their relationship at all. If he's unhappy but doesn't say anything about it, his unhappiness expresses itself in a kind of distancing coldness. This response is just what women fear most, and just the reason they prefer to express dissatisfactions and doubts - as an antidote to the isolation and distance that would result from keeping them to themselves.
The different perspectives on expressing or concealing dissatisfactions and doubts may reflect a difference in men's and women's awareness of the power of their words to affect others. In repeatedly telling him what she feared about their relationship, she spoke as though she assumed he was invulnerable and could not be hurt by what she said; perhaps she was underestimating the power of her words to affect him. For his part, when he refrains from expressing negative thoughts or feelings, he seems to be overestimating the power of his words to hurt her, when, ironically, she is more likely to be hurt by his silence than his words.
Such impasses will perhaps never be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties, but understanding the differing views can help detoxify the situation, and both can make adjustments.”
― Deborah Tannen, quote from You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
Suspect
A Study in Charlotte
Her Body and Other P...
At Swim, Two Boys
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