Kathy Acker Quotes

Happy will they be who lend ear to the words of the dead.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The living are more important than the dead.

Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me.

The bones of the Dead will be seen to govern the fortunes of him who moves them.

When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like." I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come to my grave you will find me sitting there, proudly reading it.

Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

...if I die suddenly, my gravestone might appropriately offer this insight into my departure: "God got tired." I require lots of work.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

I have no fear of death whatsoever. I suspect that few people do, what they all fear is what might happen in the years or months before death.

'Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph.

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.

Man with his burning soul Has but an hour of breath To build a ship of Truth In which his soul may sail- Sail on the sea of death. For death takes toll Of beauty, courage, youth, Of all but Truth.

I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.

All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind

No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.

If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic.

Seldom comes Glory till a man be dead.

"Death," said Akiva. His life was leaving him fast now that he no longer held his wound. His eyes just wanted to drift closed. "I'm ready." "Well, I'm not. I hear it's dull, being dead." She said it lightly, amused, and he peered up at her. Had she just made a joke? She smiled. Smiled. He did, too. Amazed, he felt it happening, as if her smile had triggered a reflex in him. "Dull sounds nice," he said, letting his eyes flutter closed. "Maybe I can catch up on my reading."

Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.

It seems to me a most dreadful thing to go out of the world and not leave one person behind you who is sorry you are gone,' said Anne, shuddering.