Katherine Dunn Quotes & Sayings

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool. — Katherine Dunn

It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.' Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal. — Katherine Dunn

Women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice. — Katherine Dunn

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries ... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals ... — Katherine Dunn

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes. — Katherine Dunn

Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea. — Katherine Dunn

Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do. — Katherine Dunn

How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. — Katherine Dunn

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless. — Katherine Dunn

She talks. People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback can't hide anything. My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves. They begin out of simple courtesy. Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their apparent deformities. That's how it starts. But I am like a stranger on the bus and they get hooked on having a listener. They go too far because I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault. They stretch out their dampest secrets because a creature like me has no values or morals. If I am "good" (and they assume that I am), it's obviously for lack of opportunity to be otherwise. And I listen. I listen eagerly, warmly, because I care. They tell me everything eventually. — Katherine Dunn

You must have wished a million times to be normal."
"No."
"No?"
"I've wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I've wished for a fish's tail instead of legs. I've wished to be more special."
"Not normal?"
"Never. — Katherine Dunn

You just want to know that you're all right. You just want to feel all right." And now he dives into the sneer. Arty's sneer could flay a rhino. "That's all you need other people's love for! — Katherine Dunn

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie. — Katherine Dunn

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering. — Katherine Dunn

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate. — Katherine Dunn

He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, 'The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.' Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then. — Katherine Dunn

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc. — Katherine Dunn

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. — Katherine Dunn

There are the those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. — Katherine Dunn

The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. — Katherine Dunn

Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again. — Katherine Dunn

Consider the whole thing as occupational therapy. Power as cottage industry for the mad. The shepherd is slave to the sheep. A gardener is in thrall to his carrots. Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You've seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn't matter. We designate this victim as a 'stand-up guy' by the simple expedient of sitting down around him. — Katherine Dunn

Beside Mama, in my own folding chair, with my feet sticking out in front of me, I thought about my own innards. Just a few months before I'd had no idea whether my reproductive equipment worked. There was no evidence. But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth. — Katherine Dunn

Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass. — Katherine Dunn

The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power. — Katherine Dunn

And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet. — Katherine Dunn

I suspect people are suckers for a prick. I suspect folks just naturally go belly-up for a snob. Folks figure if a guy acts like he's King Tut and everybody else is donkey shit, he must be an aristocrat. — Katherine Dunn

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me. — Katherine Dunn

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites. — Katherine Dunn

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course. — Katherine Dunn

I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating. — Katherine Dunn

Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown. — Katherine Dunn

But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on. — Katherine Dunn

The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass. — Katherine Dunn

Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.' Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way. — Katherine Dunn

I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique. — Katherine Dunn

Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results. — Katherine Dunn

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are. — Katherine Dunn

The top head would have controlled everything and made his poor little butt-brother miserable. — Katherine Dunn

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident. — Katherine Dunn

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out. — Katherine Dunn

I don't mind being lord of all I survey but I don't want to have to work at it. It just wouldn't be practical. — Katherine Dunn

It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff [whiskey]. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would heisitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn't look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young. — Katherine Dunn

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. — Katherine Dunn

Crystal Lil, her door propped open, sits in front of the television with a pan in her lap, a brown bag at her feet. She — Katherine Dunn

The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort — Katherine Dunn

In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It's feeble to be an object. What's the point of being loved in return, I'd ask myself. — Katherine Dunn

Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up. — Katherine Dunn

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. — Katherine Dunn

The classic definition of slapstick runs along the line of, Funny is someone else ramming his face repeatedly into a brick wall. — Katherine Dunn

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. — Katherine Dunn

But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here. — Katherine Dunn

Every doorway, every intersection has a story. — Katherine Dunn

Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities. — Katherine Dunn

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees. — Katherine Dunn

He must love me, i thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love, but it seemed true. Unavoidable. — Katherine Dunn

What's bred in the bones, when you have bones, comes through. And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice. — Katherine Dunn

I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object. — Katherine Dunn

[I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love with these guys, then puts our hearts in harm's way. It's lovely and ghastly and extremely powerful. His best yet. — Katherine Dunn

I think that it's really important to go away and come back. — Katherine Dunn

Hey, nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that's what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys - that's you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath - that's me. And the rustling in the brush and the strange piping cries that chill the spine on a deserted road at twilight - that's the twins singing practice scales while they look for berries. — Katherine Dunn

[Pride and power] are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark. — Katherine Dunn

Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them. — Katherine Dunn

And me all the while having to pee - coughing into the mike when my throat was tired and raw - eyes stinging and lips and chin crumpling in grief at his anger. The sweet tinkle of Electra on the bass and Iphy on the treble with Mama's voice counting, "One and two and ... " as the twins had their piano lesson inside the trailer. The gurgle and hum of the pumps that filtered my brother Arty's "Aqua Boy" tank. And the dim round moon of baby Fortunato's face peering at me from the dark of the risers above Papa. — Katherine Dunn

My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves. — Katherine Dunn

I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you. — Katherine Dunn

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men. — Katherine Dunn

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me. — Katherine Dunn

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.
Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull. — Katherine Dunn

Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak. — Katherine Dunn

Just as a snowflake
went on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, the
pumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,
and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, my
father's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea. — Katherine Dunn

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers. — Katherine Dunn

What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves? — Katherine Dunn

I do not plan any painting, but begin with layers of textures and colors. As I layer the colors, something is suggested to me from within, and that is how it evolves. — Katherine Dunn

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area. — Katherine Dunn

But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture. — Katherine Dunn

The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance. — Katherine Dunn

A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour. — Katherine Dunn

The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized. — Katherine Dunn