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Quote by Kathy Acker

“It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.”

Quote by Kathy Acker

Book:In Memoriam to Identity

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In Memoriam to Identity

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Author

Kathy Acker was an American novelist known for her experimental writing style and critical explorations of gender, power, and culture. Her works often blended historical, literary, and philosophical elements, challenging traditional narrative structures. more

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“...the following parable may be useful. Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorification. She realized one could take each herd and ‘count’ it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of ‘numbers’, which were nonsense words like ‘one, two, three, . . . ’ specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented. According to this parable, decategorification started out as a stroke of mathematical genius. Only later did it become a matter of dumb habit, which we are now struggling to overcome by means of categorification.”

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“A lot of people call you a feminist painter." "What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?”

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Author:Margaret Atwood

“the fact that maybe men think if they just name everything, everything’ll be okay, the fact that it’s like dogs marking their territory”

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Book:Ducks, Newburyport

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“In life, the categories we belong to can change very easily and can change so very easily that we in fact belong to every single category! We are hunter, we are victim; we are master, we are slave; we are rich, we are poor; we are lock, we are key! We belong to every category!”

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“The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.”

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“I must offer a word of warning to believers. Often the work of the Lord may tempt us away from communion with Him. A full schedule or preaching, counseling, and travel can erode the strength of the mightiest servant of the Lord. Public prayer will never make up for closet communion.”

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Source: The Autobiography of George Müller

“Before 1802, cirrus, cumulus, and altostratus clouds hadn’t been given names. Untitled before 1802, the shapes were present in the sky, ethereal or ephemeral, presumably since the big bang, but un-designated, until they needed to be. Why then? The world hasn’t been fully seen, until it is named.”

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Book:Men and Apparitions

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“...a name is almost always a sort of cowardice---an attempt to confine a thing to being only what it is, rather than what it may be.”

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Book:Census

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Book:Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

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“Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much.”

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Author:China Miéville