Katherine Dunn Quotes

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

There are the those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.' Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way.

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.

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

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

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

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.

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

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

Basically, we are pack animals. We may be evolving toward hive animals. The nature of the pack is that if all the eyes of the pack are on you, you are either the leader, or you are lunch. So it's a basically hazardous situation to have the eyes of the pack upon you. And I think that's really visceral. I think that's bred in the bone. That's species - deep.

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.

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

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.

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

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.

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