The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Chris Kraus

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.

brave, female, human, inspirational, revolutionary

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

I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I’m drawn to you cause I see how you can help me take my life apart…

idolisation, lust, oh-my, self-destruction

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?

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.

art, bad-art, characters, creativity, jane-eyre

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?

art, identity, memory, past

When the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.

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

art, failing, failure, making-art

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.

empathy, highly-sensitive-person, hsp, imagination, inner-life

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.

attraction, falling-in-love, in-love, infatuation, love, men, women

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?

feminism, serious-young-woman, sex, sexuality, women

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.

expectations-of-women, female-vulnerability, female-writers, feminism, vulnerability, women, women-writers