Katherine Dunn Quotes (34 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

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


    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.


    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.

    What's bred in the bones, when you have bones, comes through. And they looked at her, and watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.

    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.

    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.

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

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

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

    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.

    I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

    Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

    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.

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


    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.

    I think that it's really important to go away and come back.

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

    We have been permitted to turn our back on the frailty of life. I mean we live so much longer, and the constant presence of death is part of life.

    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.

    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.

    I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

    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.

    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.

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


    But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.

    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.

    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.

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


    More Katherine Dunn Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Woman - Man - Custom & Convention - Thought & Thinking - Death & Dying - Babies - Movies - Violence - Nature - Books - America - Language - Tea - Family - Power - Nurture - Charity - Astronomy & Cosmology - Mind - View All Katherine Dunn Quotations

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