My Mother Quotes

“I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven of going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Despite my profound and continuing fascination with decadence and decay, with where dead humans lose their bones, I'm more stable than I've been in a very long time.
But don't start imagining that everything's okay with me. Or the opposite.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“The dormitory had been carved out of those grand rooms once polluted by aristocrats and rich people.

Beatrice had disappeared from my world.

I was in Prague. Caught among buildings that were dark: a square of buildings. The poet of those buildings, Pierre, and I, lovers for many years, were fucking on a tattered red carpet in a hotel. I had to find my hotel.

Pierre pointed to an old, as if marbled, red column that rose above the city, so far that I couldn't see its top. He explained to me that this is his family's home: the column runs through the sky horizontally over the whole city.

I ascertained that Pierre's parents are wealthy. I had never known this before.

Pierre left me.

The dark square of buildings, named 'The Dormitory,' in which I was standing lies in the upper right quadrant of the city. A long, narrow, black plank or street connected this square to its twin that occupied the city's upper left quarter. I had to reach the second square so that I wouldn't be murdered.

As I started walking the black plank, the sky above the black was yellow.

Now I was in the second square, standing in a hotel, which was Pierre's hotel. So it must belong to Pierre. Since I hadn't wanted to be in his hotel, I had to be lost.

I was lost in a foreign city, as I've been time and time again.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“I told him the details of my sex life with Bataille most likely to arouse the desires dormant in him that I desired. Soon he began questioning me about the acts he found most disgusting and so most wanted to commit.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“All my life I've dreamt dreams that, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Education, or the repetition and internalization of set models and the childhood seen through the lens of this education are false. Not just the models taught in class, but all perceptual models made and turned absolute. For instance, when I was a child, I didn't actually know either St. Pierre or Burpface, yet I defined myself, predicated my identity on how they saw me and how I perceived how they saw me. The above dream has shown me that, since the identity I was taught was fake, childhood is a fake.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“We live by the images of those we decide are heroes and gods.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Maps are dreams: both describe desire, where you want to go, but never the reality of the destination.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Since an emotion's an announcement of value, in this society of the death (of values) emotions moved like zombies through humans.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“There's no more education, no more culture - if culture depends on a commonly understood history - and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There's War.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“All my emotions, fantasies, imaginings, desires are reality because I must have a life that matters, that is emotional. I don't want to speak anymore about anything that's serious. I just want to speak.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Even if I do attain some goal, at that very moment the only thing that's important to me is to go beyond that which is no longer a goal but now only a stage.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology