Katherine Dunn

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

— Katherine Dunn

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 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.

— Katherine Dunn

I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest.

— Katherine Dunn

She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight.

— Katherine Dunn

'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.

— Katherine Dunn

Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum.

— Katherine Dunn

She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.

— Katherine Dunn

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.

— Katherine Dunn

And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.

— Katherine Dunn

I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love.

— Katherine Dunn

The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.

— 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

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

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

— Katherine Dunn