The collection / 30 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

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 some remove?

Chris Kraus / quote

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02Undated

...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.

Chris Kraus / quote

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03Undated

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 onto which we can project our fantasies.

Chris Kraus / quote

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04Undated

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

Chris Kraus / quote

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05Undated

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: No, it's just a dumb infatuation. I'm so ashamed.S: But even if his silence hurts you, isn't that what attracted you to him? The fact that he was inaccessible. So, I think there is a contradiction there, at least nothing to feel ashamed of -.

Chris Kraus / quote

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06Undated

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

Chris Kraus / quote

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07Undated

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 why.... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.

Chris Kraus / quote

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08Undated

Dear Dick, I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your "fragility", but I'm not sure that I agree. There's nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It's a "problem" you're confronting all the time. I'm just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave... And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we've been through.

Chris Kraus / quote

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09Undated

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 up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?

Chris Kraus / quote

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10Undated

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 played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.

Chris Kraus / quote

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11Undated

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 makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.

Chris Kraus / quote

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12Undated

We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

Chris Kraus / quote

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13Undated

When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.

Chris Kraus / quote

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14Undated

If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.

Chris Kraus / quote

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15Undated

If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?

Chris Kraus / quote

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16Undated

It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.

Chris Kraus / quote

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17Undated

Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.

Chris Kraus / quote

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18Undated

There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what’s the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.

Chris Kraus / quote

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19Undated

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

Chris Kraus / quote

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20Undated

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

Chris Kraus / quote

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21Undated

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 of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it's like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating under the surface. Wanting sex to realise things I knew.

Chris Kraus / quote

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22Undated

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.

Chris Kraus / quote

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23Undated

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. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly powerful icon of erotic integrity.

Chris Kraus / quote

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24Undated

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'd become a full-time job and I wasn't ready to be unemployed.

Chris Kraus / quote

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