Top 70 Kathy Acker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Dreams are manifestations of identities.”

— Kathy Acker

2. “I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.”

— Kathy Acker

3. “You can’t change old people. Unlike middle-aged people, they do what they want.”

— Kathy Acker

4. “Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express.”

— Kathy Acker

5. “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.”

— Kathy Acker

6. “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.”

— Kathy Acker

7. “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.”

— Kathy Acker

8. “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.”

— Kathy Acker

9. “The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.”

— Kathy Acker

10. “The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.”

— Kathy Acker

11. “Intense sexual desire is the best thing in the world.”

— Kathy Acker

12. “First of all, writing at best – certainly fiction writing – more and more I think is magic.”

— Kathy Acker

13. “If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything.”

— Kathy Acker

14. “Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.”

— Kathy Acker

15. “You create identity, you’re not given identity per se. What became more and more interesting to me wasn’t the I, it was text because it’s text that create identity. That’s how I got interested in plagiarism.”

— Kathy Acker

16. “Pain is the world. I don’t have anywhere to run.”

— Kathy Acker

17. “There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn’t bother to read it.”

— Kathy Acker

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “It’s all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These 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.”

— Kathy Acker

Featured in: Strong Quotes

19. “Even if we die, if we have to become monsters and everyone hates us, we have to read the book because it will teach us how to avoid the alligator’s jaws, the wolves who wait in the forest, the huge snakes, and how to become birds.”

— Kathy Acker

20. “It was only when we were in that bed, high above the world – then I thought the birds could have been circling around our bodies circled around each other – that we made our world totally separated from everything else. It was the only way we could be together.”

— Kathy Acker

21. “I’m sick of this society. “Earn a living” as if I’m not yet living; lobotomized and robotized from birth, they tell me I can’t do anything I want to do in the subtlest and sneakiest ways possible. They want to erase all possible hints that I’ve been born. I have two centers: love and my desire to sleep.”

— Kathy Acker

22. “Come alive, dead heart, and sing.”

— Kathy Acker

23. “All memory can do is scream for touch.”

— Kathy Acker

24. “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.”

— Kathy Acker

25. “Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we’ll start to be happy.”

— Kathy Acker

26. “I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.”

— Kathy Acker

27. “Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.”

— Kathy Acker

28. “I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious.”

— Kathy Acker

29. “I wasn’t really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.”

— Kathy Acker

30. “Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you’re someone else.”

— Kathy Acker

31. “It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.”

— Kathy Acker

32. “Thats what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.”

— Kathy Acker

33. “Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”

— Kathy Acker

34. “Dear David, Are you a Tibetan monk yet? I used to hate you because you didn’t love me so much you would give up your whole life for me. I expect this of every man. In retrospect, I realize that I was also selfish: I should have stopped making demands that you not be the closet female-hating sadist you are.”

— Kathy Acker

35. “I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don’t get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.”

— Kathy Acker

36. “Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.”

— Kathy Acker

37. “What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?”

— Kathy Acker

38. “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.”

— Kathy Acker

39. “Culture is that which falsifies.”

— Kathy Acker

40. “We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways – you know minor ways and major ways – like what you’ve just encountered which isn’t censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.”

— Kathy Acker

41. “Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.”

— Kathy Acker

42. “I’m what happens after death, which is writing.”

— Kathy Acker

43. “I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because Im not so censored when I use dream material.”

— Kathy Acker

44. “Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I’m grateful when you use it.”

— Kathy Acker

45. “Those who are driven by poverty, those who’re free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning.”

— Kathy Acker

46. “I think it’s really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.”

— Kathy Acker

47. “I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for hours. All land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it’s becoming harder to get off the roads.”

— Kathy Acker

48. “She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.”

— Kathy Acker

49. “All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she’s a total freak. The kid’s beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you’re worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you... You don’t know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.”

— Kathy Acker

50. “I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.”

— Kathy Acker