Kathy Acker Quotes

However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

When we use terms we get confused, yet we have no other way.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory;

Knowledge and Experience do not necessarily speak the same language.

There is a flaw with words, they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment

At every moment where language can't go, that's your mind.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind.

-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.

Reality is only just a word.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

I think, therefore I am confused.

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

I know why we're here. We're all here because we're not all there.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

nothing is so horrifying as the possibility of existing simply because we do not know how to die.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." I say, "I do not think, that is why I exist."

None of us have much idea where we are. Perhaps all our lives are too concerned with where, and not enough with who.