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Why are they ashamed and miserable?" — Kathy Acker

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"Why are they ashamed and miserable?" "Theyre repenting theyre white. Any thinking human does it. Dont you read your own history books? So if you attack those miserable moderns or modernist, knight, youll be making a miserable historical mistake. You will be preventing whites from hating their own whiteness." Don Quixote finally refused the dogs attack on her attack: "Liberalism has never stopped me from doing anything", said the knight."
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Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker
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Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, performance artist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with complex themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality, language, identity, and rebellion. Her writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and s

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"The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Propertys pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified."
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Kathy Acker

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"Yeah, there was a period in the late 80s where I was working with different shaman. Myself and a friend, Beene, would take ayahuasca - but it wouldnt be in the liquid form, it would be a freeze-dried pill - and mushrooms. Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and Ill never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didnt like me. Its like, Why cant I be your friend? I was crawling out of my skin at that time. In my twenties I was really... I was just losing my mind."
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Tori Amos
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"I confess without shame that I am tired & sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies […] It is only those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrills & groans of the wounded & lacerated (friend or foe) that cry aloud for more blood & more vengeance, more desolation & so help me God as a man & soldier I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed & submissive before me but will say ‘Go sin no more.’"
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William Tecumseh Sherman
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"Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he? He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air. A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a cranes and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a birds, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek."
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man