Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

Acker’s casual “Yeah, I mean” isn’t modesty; it’s a rhetorical shoulder-check. She takes the pious language of authorship (masterpiece, ownership, legacy) and replaces it with something closer to street-level exchange: work is “out there,” available, meant to be handled. That phrasing matters. “Out there” refuses the museum vitrines of Literature-with-a-capital-L and aligns with the underground economies Acker lived in: punk scenes, photocopies, pirated texts, bodies in motion, language in collision.

The line also flips the usual hierarchy between artist and audience. Instead of demanding reverence, she asks for use. Not “understand it,” not “buy it,” not “respect it,” but use it - like a tool, a weapon, a costume, a virus. That’s Acker’s core method in miniature: appropriation as politics. She built novels from stolen and remixed materials (from porn to Dickens) to expose how “originality” often masks power: who gets to speak, who gets to quote, who gets sued. If culture is already a cut-and-paste machine, she’s saying, stop pretending it’s sacred.

Then there’s the sly tenderness in “I’m grateful when you use it.” Gratitude is disarming because it makes the transaction reciprocal. She’s not the solitary genius dispensing art; she’s part of a circuit where meaning is produced by circulation. The subtext is permission and provocation at once: take what you need, but take responsibility for what you do with it. In an era of tightening IP regimes and sanitized canon-making, Acker’s “use” reads like a quietly militant ethic of cultural commons.