170 Quotes by Kim Gordon

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who you are, or what you're doing, and in fact most people don't.

. . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.

I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.

L.A. in the late sixties had a desolation about it, a disquiet. More than anything, that had to do with a feeling, one that you still find in parts of the San Fernando Valley. There was a sense of apocalyptic expanse, of sidewalks and houses centipeding over mountains and going on forever, combined with a shrugging kind of anchorlessness. Growing up I was always aware of L.A.'s diffuseness, its lack of an attachment to anything other than its own good reflection in the mirror.

I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.

All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.

I give Iggy credit for deconstructing the very idea of entertainment.

The only really good performance is the one where you make yourself vulnerable, while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone.