Katherine Dunn
23 quotes
Biography
Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love (1989).
"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."
"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."
"I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest."
"She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight."
"'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye."
"Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum."
"She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming."
"It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls freakish."
"And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice."
"I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love."
"The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles."
"American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc."
"Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate."
"American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc."
"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."
"I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating."
"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."
"'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure."
"We came to Portland because there was a good alternative public school. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it. I left his dad and went to work slinging hash in a breakfast diner and working nights tending bar in a biker tavern."
"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."
"I'm like every waitress in every diner I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all."
"In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and '70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide."