Quotes from Chris Kraus

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)

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.

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

We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.

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

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.

I'm torn between maintaining you as an entity to write to and talking with you as a person.

And isn't every letter a love letter?

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.

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?

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.

I'm thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—"a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.

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.

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).

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.

to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you've ever had.

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'm wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the '70s has been read only as "collaborative" and "feminist.

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...

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.

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.

To initiate something is to play the fool.

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