33 Katherine Dunn Quotes

Katherine Dunn quotes

1. 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.

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

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

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

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

6. She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.

7. There may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls freakish.

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

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

10. The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.

11. 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.

1. We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.

2. Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.

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

4. I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

5. A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.

6. My own theory about the phlegmatic qualities and properties of the English is the mountain of pure white sugar hydrocarbons they consume every day bloody day of the year - the stiff upper lip is petrified sugar; that's Bermuda's revenge, the with death, the rotting future square in the teeth of it.

7. Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.

8. There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.

9. My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.

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

11. In a really good, closely matched situation, the style of the boxer is every bit as explicit and specific to him as a painter's hand.

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

13. I'd always been fascinated by boxing and became very engaged with it through my husband, actually. But I started to write about it because so many decent, righteous people wanted it banned.

14. I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection.

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

16. I've met some of the most interesting, dimensional, and kind people of my life in that subculture and around the sport. And it seems to me that boxing is one of those structures that is designed to promote harmony. I think that it is a stove that contains that fire in us and makes it safe and useful.

17. Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.

18. Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.

19. 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.

20. Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.

21. No, I've never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993. I'd been writing about the sport for a dozen years by then and wanted to know what boxers endured, what it felt like. I was too old to compete when I started, but I sparred enough to get a taste.

22. 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.