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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Unique
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.Collection: Children
Women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Men
My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.Collection: People
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Enough
Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.Collection: Wish
[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.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Thinking
Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.Collection: Thinking
My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Color
I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.Collection: Mother
Beside Mama, in my own folding chair, with my feet sticking out in front of me, I thought about my own innards. Just a few months before I'd had no idea whether my reproductive equipment worked. There was no evidence. But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Cat
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.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Evil
Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.Collection: Feels
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.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Iron
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.Collection: Strong