Katherine Dunn - Geek Love (1989)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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 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
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
'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.

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
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
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