62+ Katherine Dunn Quotes On Education, Religion And Politics

Katherine Dunn was an American novelist, best known for her 1989 novel Geek Love. She was also a journalist, essayist, and short story writer, and her work often explored themes of family, identity, and the human condition. She was a fixture in the Portland, Oregon literary scene until her death in 2016. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Katherine Dunn on education, religion, leadership.

Top 10 Katherine Dunn Quotes

1. Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.
2. Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
3. 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.
4. Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
5. Women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice.
6. Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
7. 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.
8. In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.
9. 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.
10. Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.

Katherine Dunn Short Quotes

• There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can't die soon enough.
• But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.
• I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
• Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.
• I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.
• Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.
• A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
• Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.
• But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
• My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.

Katherine Dunn Quotes About Love

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 anyones comfort - Arturo Binewski. — Katherine Dunn

[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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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

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. — Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn Quotes About Violence

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

The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Katherine Dunn

Just as a snowflakewent on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, thepumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, myfather's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless. — Katherine Dunn

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

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. — Katherine Dunn

How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. — Katherine Dunn

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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

And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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

But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me. — Katherine Dunn

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

I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you. — Katherine Dunn

I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area. — Katherine Dunn

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

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. — Katherine Dunn

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. — Katherine Dunn

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course. — Katherine Dunn

Life Lessons by Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn's work emphasizes the importance of self-expression and resilience in the face of adversity. She also encourages readers to embrace their own individual identities and to be unafraid to challenge societal norms. Her work offers an inspiring reminder that we can all find strength in our own unique stories and experiences.