Katherine Dunn famous quotes

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

#Winning #Use #Freak

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

#Magic #Age #Trouble

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

#Crystals #Mama #Papa

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

#Lying #Comfort #Insult

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

#Brain #Behaviour #Mediocrity

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

#Stories #Doorways #Intersections

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

#Dog #Fashion #Real

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can't die soon enough.
-- Katherine Dunn

#Men #Texas #Years

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

#Unique #Glimpse #Normalcy

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

#Life #Baby #Believe

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

#Two #Long #People

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

#Fighting #Boys #Men

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

#Ideas #Culture #Care

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

#Military #Soldier #Groups

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

#Reader #Storyteller

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

#Thinking #Research

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

#Thinking #Important #Going Away

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

#Athlete #Training #Female

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

#Men #Bravery #Selfless

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

#Pain #Nausea #Proof

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

#Sex #Tired #Would Be

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

#Thinking #Odds #Giving

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

#Animal #Reflection #Painting

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

#Book #Thinking #Animation

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

#Strong #Pull Ups #Return

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

#Cat #Air #Sea

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

#Evil #Childhood #Darkness

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

#Book #Thinking #Directors

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

#Feels

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

#Heart #Bees #Like You

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 lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.
-- Katherine Dunn

#Sweet #Rain #Light

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

#Beautiful #Mistake #Luck

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

#Color #Texture #Layers

Were 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

#Enough #Publishing #Interpersonal

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

#Hurt #Ideas #Feet

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

#Men #Female #Growing

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

#Everyday #Research #Medical

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

#Sex #Ideas #Males

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

#Beautiful #Hurt #Earthquakes

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

#War #Long #Romance

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

#People #Worst

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

#Men #Years #Land

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
-- Katherine Dunn

#Children #Grief #Reality

A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
-- Katherine Dunn

#Freak #Born #Made

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

#Nice #Heartless #Pay

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

#Sweet #Men #Feminist

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

#Struggle #Survival #Tools

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

#School #Tea #Cups

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

#Thinking #Coincidence #Universe

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

#Mother #Healing #Eye

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

#Writing #Thinking #People

We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
-- Katherine Dunn

#Innocence #Forgetfulness #Stamina

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

#Glasses #Milk #Staggering