Quotes by Chris Kraus

“...to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you've ever had.”

“Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen on...”

“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 ...”

“There were some low moments out there on the road tonightabandonment and whats the point?but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurt...”

“Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality.”

“Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons w...”

“Dear Dick, I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvre keeps talking about us disturbing your "fragility", but I'm not sure that I agree. There's nothing so remarka...”

“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)?...”

“It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is pla...”

“Anyone who feels to much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.”

“Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?”

“Dear Dick, I guess it's been a case of infatuation... Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone.... Whereas the sex-infatuations that's male *you, Shake, the priest) leap out ...”

“Oh Dick, you eroticise what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.”

“So don't be too fast to attribute yourself with miraculous sexual powers, The Christ of Love. Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and in all fairness, You owe us everything. Whil...”

“What's the matter?" you asked, seizing an idea. "Did I burst your balloon - destroy the fantasy?"I struggled for a way to answer this without my clothes.... Well his was very cruel, but loving you'...”

“Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. ("Complicity is like a girl's name," writes Dodie Bellamy).”

“No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.”

“S: But Chris, I think his embarrassment isn't in relation to you or me but to himself. What can he do?C: I hate being thrown into such a physical state.S: Isn't that experiencing life to the hilt?C...”

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

“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 ma...”