Top 126 Quotes & Sayings by Katherine Dunn - Page 2

I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.

It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.

A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

At its heart, 'Fat City' is not about boxing. It is a universal story of grim realities and toxic delusions. It is awash with awareness of chances blown, dreams stymied, precious time wasted, and all future prospects scorched to ashes by the process.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

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

'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.

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

I think it is the natural and innate function of certain organisms to secrete beauty in permanent forms we call artworks, to respond to beauty by answering its discovery with a new beauty.

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.

I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.

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.

I'm just a regular Joe.

In boxing, it just seemed to me from the time I was a very small child, we have a peculiarly civilized form in that boxers don't screech and holler. They don't use weapons. When the bell rings, they fight; when the bell rings again, they stop.

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.

Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don't feel that way.

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

Women are real. Our reality covers the whole human megillah, from feeble to fierce, from bad to good, from endangered to dangerous. We don't just deserve power, we have it. And power in this and every other society is not just the capacity to benefit those around us.

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.

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

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.

Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

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.

I do consider the human capacity for violence is the central issue of the social contract. In boxing we have a peculiarly civilized form, in that boxers don't screech and holler. They don't use weapons. All of this seems to me quite amazing, because it is so disciplined, so controlled. It's ritualized, but absolutely genuine. And the cultural structure built around that ritual is absolutely fascinating to me. 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.

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.

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.

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

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.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

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.

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.

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.

He must love me, i thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love, but it seemed true. Unavoidable.

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.