Katherine Dunn Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katherine Dunn