Katherine Dunn Quotes
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My own theory about the phlegmatic qualities and properties of the English is the mountain of pure white sugar hydrocarbons they consume every day bloody day of the year - the stiff upper lip is petrified sugar; that's Bermuda's revenge, the with death, the rotting future square in the teeth of it.
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Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum.
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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.
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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.
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She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.
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I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
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I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.
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In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and '70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.
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But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.
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Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.
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And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.
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We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.
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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.
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Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
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Women are real. Our reality covers the whole human megillah, from feeble to fierce, from bad to good, from endangered to dangerous. We don't just deserve power, we have it. And power in this and every other society is not just the capacity to benefit those around us.
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There are 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.
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My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new-world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards and palms.
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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.
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My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.
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We came to Portland because there was a good alternative public school. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it. I left his dad and went to work slinging hash in a breakfast diner and working nights tending bar in a biker tavern.
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Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
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Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The boxing booths at English fairs featured women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.
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My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.