Top 66 Katherine Dunn Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.
Katherine Dunn
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.
Katherine Dunn
#7. It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
Katherine Dunn
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?
Katherine Dunn
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
Katherine Dunn
#14. Women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice.
Katherine Dunn
#15. 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
#16. I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.
Katherine Dunn
#17. But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
Katherine Dunn
#18. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous.
Katherine Dunn
#19. I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.
Katherine Dunn
#20. 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
#21. My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.
Katherine Dunn
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. [Pride and power] are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark.
Katherine Dunn
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The classic definition of slapstick runs along the line of, Funny is someone else ramming his face repeatedly into a brick wall.
Katherine Dunn
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
Katherine Dunn
#34. Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.
Katherine Dunn
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
Katherine Dunn
#38. The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass.
Katherine Dunn
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.
Katherine Dunn
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.
Katherine Dunn
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.
Katherine Dunn
#49. The top head would have controlled everything and made his poor little butt-brother miserable.
Katherine Dunn
#50. [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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
Katherine Dunn
#56. 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
#57. Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass.
Katherine Dunn
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
Katherine Dunn
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.
Katherine Dunn
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