Quotes from Kim Gordon

In "Shadow of a Doubt," I was trying to describe the connection you feel when your eyes meet another person's. You project all kinds of things on those eyes, feel them seeing into and past you, sometimes feel the sex behind them too.

Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I "empowered"? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a "strong woman"? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don't fall to your death.

Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston's and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are.

Hold me tight, down on my knees, so I don't go burning 'cross the breeze.

I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.

The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. . . everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control.

to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.

That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who you are, or what you're doing, and in fact most people don't.

Families are like little villages. You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until your physically no longer there.

I've always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect.

All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.

It wasn't some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation

I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace.

but I couldn't decide if I was a courageous person in real life or whether I could only sing onstage. In that way I haven't changed much in thirty years at all.

Eu nunca quis ser qualquer coisa, exceto quem eu era.

If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.

But I would make it through "Death Valley." Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.

Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations.

a place people are drawn to because they don't realize deep down they're actually afraid of what they want. It's new, and they're escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown.

In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.

Writing about New York is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn't fall in love with New York, because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.

As memórias que eu tenho, e a casa que ainda é minha, ambas estão cheias de coisas que adornam uma vida que eu já não vivo, sentimentos que eu já não tenho.