Katherine Dunn Quotes

“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.”

“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 child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary.”

“The shepherd is slave to the sheep. A gardener is in thrall to his carrots.”

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

“A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”

“People talk easily to me. . . I am like a stranger on the bus and they get hooked on having a listener. They go too far because I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault . . . I listen eagerly, warmly, because I care. They tell me everything.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“There are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy.”

“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it.”

“We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting lollipop or a toy bear’d worth of comfort.”

“Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion.”

“We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him.”