Katherine Dunn Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass."

Katherine Dunn
She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight.

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
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
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
I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love.

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
It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls freakish.

Katherine Dunn
And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.

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

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

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

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

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
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
Tweezer Painton was a burly ten-year-old with a glower built into his square mug. His name came from his hobby of grabbing individual hairs on his victims' heads and yanking them out for fun.

Katherine Dunn
When Rhonda replayed that day in her mind, the only thing she felt good about was bashing Tim "Tweezer" Painton on the head and rolling him into the river. It was the right thing to do.

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
The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, and drink it very slowly.

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

Katherine Dunn
She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.

Katherine Dunn
Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent. The novel is set in the world of small-town, small-time boxing, and I've been reporting on that sport for 30 years, so every boxing assignment is added research.

Katherine Dunn
At one point I had hundreds of pages about a particular character, and had a lot of fun with him before I realized his entire function in the story could be performed by a few news headlines. He was more weather than personality.

Katherine Dunn
Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum.

Katherine Dunn
I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest.

Katherine Dunn
The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.

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
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