Katherine Dunn Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

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.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

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.

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.

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

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.

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

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.

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.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

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

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

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.

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

A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

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

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

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

I'm like every waitress in every diner I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.

'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.

I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating.

I am here, come closer, ” the old donkey said with her eyes. “I will mother you.

[Pride and power] are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark.