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Quote by Viv Albertine

“I remember what Sid Vicious taught me about fighting: Do the worst thing you can think of first. Except I threatened the worst thing first, 'If you want to take it outside, let's take it outside,' I said, putting the hardest, coldest look I could muster into my eyes. 'And I'll put this bottle in your face.' I picked up an empty bottle of Heineken with such fluidity of movement you'd think I did this sort of thing every day.”

Quote by Viv Albertine

Book:To Throw Away Unopened
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To Throw Away Unopened

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Viv Albertine

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“Sid's quite awkward and talks in spurts like he thinks it's stupid to have a point of view, but he's got to communicate, so he forces the words out. I can see it's not that he's unsure of his opinions, he just thinks it's pathetic to have a strong opinion on any subject; to be intelligent means being able to see all sides.”

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“One day Sid turns up in the peg trousers and they're in ribbons. He'd sliced them up with a razor blade because he hated them so much but he couldn't find his jeans so when he wanted to go out he had to stick them back together. He joined the rips with loads of safety pins, all the way down his legs, hundreds of them. That’s how the ‘loads of safety pins’ thing started amongst people in clubs: they copied it, but he only did it because he couldn’t be bothered to sew his trousers up.”

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“Whenever I get a free period, I set off to the college library and work systematically through the Dewey system, taking each book off the shelf one by one and adding, in black biro, ‘/she’ and ‘/woman’ to every ‘he’ and ‘man’. I do this for the whole three years but I never finish (and luckily I never get caught). I do it with righteous indignation; there is hardly one book in the whole library that doesn’t use only the generic male pronoun. As if only men think and feel and discover and read. We’ve been taught on this course that every single mark and sound on film or the page is important and laden with meaning, and yet every book in this library talks only to men. Language is important: it shapes minds, it can include, exclude, incite, hurt and destroy. If language isn’t powerful, why not call your teacher a cunt?”

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“You know, a government should be a good thing. The Anglo-Saxons and the Germans rejoice in the phenomenon of government. They think that the recipe for human happiness is that you should make your desires and actions concordant with those of the government. So a German and an American will try to make the government work for him, protect him, and he will be more than happy to murder to preserve that wonderful symbiosis. And if he has some money to invest, he will invest it in the government, buying government bonds. He does this regardless of whether his government happens to be trillions of dollars in debt—that is, practically bankrupt. Despite his rhetoric of private enterprise, a Westerner will invest in his government. And we, Eastern and Central Europeans, and particularly Slavs, we all consider our governments to be absolutely the worst in the world. We are ashamed of our governments, and, as a rule, our government is ashamed of us, trying to improve us statistically, to say that we work more and drink less than we do. We think that there's no greater obstacle to human happiness than the government. So even if we have an institution pregnant with democratic potential, such as workers' self-management, we never even bother to attend a meeting unless absolutely forced. And as for voting, we circle any name without looking at whose it is, out of spite. To a Slav, there is nothing more disgusting than voting. We have an aversion to investing trust in any human being. So how could we single out someone we haven't met but whom we know a priori to be a social upstart and climber? So we spend these workers' self-management meetings, where democracy could be practiced, in daydreams of sex and violence.”

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