Quotes from Katherine Dunn

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

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.

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 the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.

Understand, daughter, that the only reason for your existing was as a tribute to your uncle-father. You were meant to love him. I planned to teach you how to serve him and adore him. You would be his monument and his fortress against mortality. Forgive me. As soon as you arrived I realized that you were worth far more than that.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough.

What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?

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." —

Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.

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

Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

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

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

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.

The denial of female aggression is a destructive myth. It robs an entire gender of a significant spectrum of power, leaving women less than equal with men and effectively keeping them 'in their place' and under control.

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

There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.

It's not unfair, I think, to describe boxers as a demographic little given to literary entanglement. In general, with exceptions, they prefer movies.

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

I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.

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

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.

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

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