“All acts of sex were forms of degradation. ... What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her… — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement? — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary… — Chris Kraus Copy Share
“Back to the 1st Person: I'd even made up art theories about my inability to use it. That I'd chosen film and theater, two artforms built entirely on collisions, that only reach their meanings through collision, because I couldn't ever believe in the integrity/supremacy of the 1st Person (my own). That in order to write 1st Person narrative there needs… — Chris Kraus Copy Share
“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… — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation? — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
“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… — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
“It occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions: the only pleasure that remains once you've decided you know better than the world. Accepting contradictions means not believing any more in the primacy of "true feeling." Everything is true and simultaneously. It's why I hate Sam Shepard and all your True West stuff - it's like… — Chris Kraus Copy Share
“We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can… — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
“No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.” — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black… — Chris Kraus Copy Share
“What's the matter?" you asked, seizing an idea. "Did I burst your balloon - destroy the fantasy?" I struggled for a way to answer… — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming… — Chris Kraus Copy Share Image
