Quotes from Chris Kraus

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.

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?

leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language when you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shut down is the only way back in.

Fuck her once, she'll write a book about it

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.

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.

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

There it was, deep & huge like it'd just risen, nearly full and red orange like a blood tangerine. It felt ominous, and I'm wondering if you feel as I do - this incredible urge TO BE HEARD. Who do you talk to?

Anyway we told him Liza'd do the physical part of sex, I'd do the verbal. Together we incarnated the cyborgian split projected on all females by this culture

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.

Perhaps not passionate but comfortable. We could have gone on like that forever and then you came, the rambling man, with all these expatriate philosophies that we've outgrown ourselves over the past 20 years. This is really not our problem, Dick. You're leading a ghost town life, infecting everyone who comes near you with a ghost disease. Take it back, Dick. We don't need it.

Jerome described her as a waitress-translator, and Sylvie wondered why the women always have these hyphenated jobs? The men are all philosophers, artists, filmmakers." Kraus, Chris. Torpor (S.182)

you eroticize what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.

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

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.

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.

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?

If you're a girl, aplomb is one thing you really need: you can use it to make that rapist, that editor, back down. Aplomb: confidence and poise. She does not explain, analyze, plead, confess or fuss. She narrates; her transfiction is like O'Hara's poetry: I did this and I did that. This is what gives it its poise. She is so nonchalant, so reticent in the narration of her own life, that I think she may be some kind of saint.

Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.

Jerome doesn't have a clue. He in fact avoids the poets, with their petty feuds and righteous poverty. Endlessly competitive and introspective, they live in dumpy slum apartments and would knife each other for $5. Jerome prefers the painters and the film-makers who live in Soho and Tribeca. There's money there, at least the things they fight about are real.

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.

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

How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I'd ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way I knew of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words.

If wisdom's silence then it's time to play the fool.