Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

Acker’s line has the breezy, almost offhand permissiveness of someone refusing to play museum guard over her own art. “Used” is doing the real work here: not merely read or admired, but handled, repurposed, stolen from, misquoted, sampled. It’s a provocation aimed at the sanctity of authorship - a shrug at the idea that a text can remain pure once it leaves the writer’s hands. Coming from Acker, whose novels famously cannibalized other texts, the sentence doubles as a self-defense and a manifesto. If she built her work out of borrowed language, she’s also granting permission for others to do the same with hers.

The intent is less generosity than strategy. Acker knew that “originality” often functions as a gatekeeping myth, one that polices who gets to speak and whose stories count as legitimate property. By framing art as something “meant to be used,” she shifts value from ownership to circulation. That’s an activist posture as much as an aesthetic one: culture changes when people can touch it.

The subtext is a challenge to legal and moral frameworks that treat art like real estate. Copyright, canon formation, even the author’s brand - all are implicated. Acker’s phrasing also smuggles in a hard truth about exposure: once work is “out there,” you can’t control what happens to it. It will be misread, commodified, weaponized, loved. Her point is that this risk isn’t a tragedy; it’s the price of making anything that actually lives in public.