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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Just as a snowflakewent on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, thepumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, myfather's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.

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

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

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

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

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.

Sometimes people go off in a slightly different direction of wanting to be different, of wanting to be special, of wanting to be more, and I think that those people are often - not always, but often - genuinely different in some way. Perhaps their gender orientation is not acceptable or popular, not the norm. Or, their physical design is literally, in some way, setting them apart. Or, in many cases, they feel the burden of their ordinariness so dreadfully that they strive to find some way of being unique. I think that can be a very positive thing, but it also can be negative, destructive.

In my next life, I plan to be a more respectable creature. For now, this is what is given to us. So I don't know - I think we're all freaks at heart. I think some people strive desperately to be normal, and I think other people strive to be abnormal.

My perception of the human animal is as an extremely dangerous predator. That's who I perceive us to be as a species. Maybe the most dangerous predator on the planet, with the exception of a few microbes. I'm really grateful for the degree of socialization that prevents us, most of the time, from killing and eating each other. And I admire all the social structures that have been designed and layered and niched in that encourage bonding toward a kind of social harmony that is meant to contain and counteract our natural inclinations toward predation, ferocity, and eating whatever moves.

From the time I was little, I'd been kind of freaked out by the whole deal with large groups of people. And even moderate - sized groups of people. It's always made me very uncomfortable. It's such a strange phenomenon, what happens to people when they're all moving in the same direction, all chanting the same tune, the same line of slogans or something. That stuff always seems very alien and bizarre to me, and kind of scary.

Within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. I mean, actual freedom is a very abstract notion; we have no idea what it means, except within a context - freedom to do what? So within these social structures, freedom becomes defined as power, your ability to make choices, and the power relationship within a family, any family.

Freedom within any kind of social structure - the whole issue of exactly what the human animal is - is an ongoing preoccupation of mine. And I certainly don't think I've come to the end of that exploration, and with any luck, I never will. But I'm very curious about exactly what kind of beast we are. We're so complicated.

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.

[I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love with these guys, then puts our hearts in harm's way. It's lovely and ghastly and extremely powerful. His best yet.

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