Quotes from Rachel Kushner

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

Charles Bukowski's Factotum

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson.

She eventually got strung out herself, was arrested, took a narcotics number, a never-never number she called it, and had been in and out of prison ever since, on sales and trafficking charges.

and then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don't already know, I can't spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there might be reason to doubt everything she said.

The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn't have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.

Certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. Maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash, and then gone.

I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie's studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.

She always had that empty look. ... It's a particular blankness, and I've mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen's clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some "gentleman's" fantasy.

The important matter of small-town hair p.17

Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants.

Enchantment means to want something and also to know somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it p.71

What had actually been in Valera's haversack: not a woman's vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.

My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary , London Review of Books, January 14, 2015].

That's just one group. The most visible one. There are so many groups at this point. Many of them come together only after an action, to give those who committed the action a name, and then they disband, disappear. You can't know who is part of what. They don't know, either. They might not know they are in a group until the action is done and the group claims it.

The special connection to reality, "with which all photography is endowed," according to Rosalind Krauss, does not quite apply. It does and does not apply. Krauss likens photography to fingerprints. To the rings that cold glasses leave on tables. A photograph, she writes, is closer to a death mask or the tracks of a gull on a beach than it is to a painting or sculpture. It's the residue of things we see, rather than a reconstruction of things we see.

You can't own someone for a dollar.

If you'd showered you had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If

To show you the uselessness of the truth," he said.

I don't know if it's revolutionary not to work," she had told me, "but it's better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You're yourself and you get paid for it," or so she had thought at the time,

Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it.

S]ympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, [is] not real sympathy but sentimentality.

She was going to drink after her shift was finished. "That kind of drinking where you make a wilderness and tear a path in. You meet someone else there, deep in the woods. Go home together. Claw your way toward each the through the booze, confusion, misery, horniness.

Lonzi said the only thing worth loving was what was to come, and since what was to come was unforeseeable---only a cretin or a liar would try to predict the future---the future had to be lived now, in the now, as intensity.