Katherine Dunn Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
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I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.
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Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
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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.
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People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.
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She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight.
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In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.
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It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'
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American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
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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.
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'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.
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Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
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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.
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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.
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I've met some of the most interesting, dimensional, and kind people of my life in that subculture and around the sport. And it seems to me that boxing is one of those structures that is designed to promote harmony. I think that it is a stove that contains that fire in us and makes it safe and useful.
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Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.
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But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
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The things we do to our children - most of the evil in the world is not done with bad intentions but with the best intentions ever.
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Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.
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We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.
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Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.