Quotes from Katherine Dunn

You just want to know that you're all right. You just want to feel all right." And now he dives into the sneer. Arty's sneer could flay a rhino. "That's all you need other people's love for!

He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, 'The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.' Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.

I've conquered them. 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.

The old man is spread out on the worm buffet and

Crystal Lil, her door propped open, sits in front of the television with a pan in her lap, a brown bag at her feet. She

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

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.

Their bodies lifted up, clean and simple to her in the clear, unconscious awareness of each of their cells' sensing that she would grunt out strong young.

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.

I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the playground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me.

In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.

I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him.

The dumb little fuck was supposed to be so goddamn sensitive, how come he couldn't figure it out? All he had to do to make me like him was need me. All he had to do to make Arty like him was drop dead.

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

high heels are each big enough to bury an Egyptian in.

Most people seem to turn off at some point in their lives. Maybe it's thirty or forty. For most people it's lots younger. They stop there. Stop growing or changing or learning or something. From that point on they're dead.

It was becoming apparent that Chick himself had only one ambition and that was to help everybody so much that they would love him.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

Things were slipping on me — oranges at first — then everything.

I'd put myself to sleep only there's nobody to do my job.

I have an insidious conviction that between the onset of puberty and the age of thirty, people, like the hypothetical painting in the desert, do no exist without someone looking at them. I didn't. After thirty, I suppose we become a corporeal composite of what all of our viewers have witnessed, a kind of community gelatin.

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.