Top 50 Chris Kraus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructiv e but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

— Chris Kraus

2. “But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred.”

— Chris Kraus

3. “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

4. “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement?”

— Chris Kraus

5. “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

6. “I’m torn between maintaining you as an entity to write to and talking with you as a person.”

— Chris Kraus

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

— Chris Kraus

8. “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

9. “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?”

— Chris Kraus

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

— Chris Kraus

11. “I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse’s elite salon in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education – a.”

— Chris Kraus

12. “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

13. “Who gets to speak and why?, I wrote last week, is the only question.”

— Chris Kraus

14. “Cuando vives con tanta intensidad en la cabeza, al final no hay diferencia entre lo que imaginas y lo que ocurre de veras.”

— Chris Kraus

15. “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

16. “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

17. “And isn’t every letter a love letter?”

— Chris Kraus

18. “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

19. “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

20. “We’ve met a few times and I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer... I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together.”

— Chris Kraus

21. “They dug each other’s references and felt smarter in each other’s presence.”

— Chris Kraus

22. “If I can’t make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering ‘Would he like me?’, I wonder ‘Is he game?’ When.”

— Chris Kraus

23. “To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.”

— Chris Kraus

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself,... panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut.”

— Chris Kraus

27. “Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.”

— Chris Kraus

28. “To initiate something is to play the fool.”

— Chris Kraus

29. “It’s going to be crazy. All eight teams here are good teams. Hopefully the atmosphere will be great because it’s going to be great basketball.”

— Chris Kraus

30. “If wisdom’s silence then it’s time to play the fool.”

— Chris Kraus

31. “We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what’s forever gone.”

— Chris Kraus

32. “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?”

— Chris Kraus

33. “Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That ‘art’ is really ‘artifact,’ Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person’s whole experience and life. And that always there’s the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.”

— Chris Kraus

34. “There’s a lot of madness in New Zealand because it’s a mean and isolated little country. Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.”

— Chris Kraus

35. “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

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

— Chris Kraus

37. “The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty.”

— Chris Kraus

38. “Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?”

— Chris Kraus

39. “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.”

— Chris Kraus

40. “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

41. “Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it’s personal and private; my neurosis... I think our story is performative philosophy.”

— Chris Kraus

42. “Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind, I said, 20 percent had to come from you. You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication.”

— Chris Kraus

43. “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.”

— Chris Kraus

44. “Remembering what it felt like to be 20 overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words.”

— Chris Kraus

45. “Last week at school Pam Struger wondered why the brilliant girls all die.”

— Chris Kraus

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

— Chris Kraus

47. “The difference between now and fifteen years ago is I don’t think I was able, ever, to write any of those notebooks then in the 1st Person. I had to find these ciphers for myself because whenever I tried writing in the 1st Person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can’t stop writing in the 1st Person, it feels like it’s the last chance I’ll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.”

— Chris Kraus

48. “I was unhappy too. And until we own our history, she thought, I thought, there can be no change.”

— Chris Kraus

49. “We’re touched by the nostalgia, seeing Walter at the center of our extended European family but our smarter selves find greater satisfaction knowing history as we understand it is really just an avalanche of garbage toppling down.”

— Chris Kraus

50. “Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it.”

— Chris Kraus