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 a lollipop or a toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

— Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn Quotes

The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance.

— Katherine Dunn

I don’t mind being lord of all I survey but I don’t want to have to work at it. It just wouldn’t be practical.

— Katherine Dunn

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. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

— Katherine Dunn

Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous assassins.

— Katherine Dunn

He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, ‘The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.’ Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.

— Katherine Dunn

My heart died. Arty would despise her. But Mama told me to go on hoping. “Go ahead and love her,” Mama said. I’ve wondered since whether those were Mama’s last words, the final sizzle of her synapses.

— Katherine Dunn

The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous.

— Katherine Dunn

Crystal Lil, her door propped open, sits in front of the television with a pan in her lap, a brown bag at her feet. She.

— Katherine Dunn

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.

— Katherine Dunn

Most people seem to turn off at some point in their lives. Maybe it’s thirty or forty. For most people it’s lots younger. They stop there. Stop growing or changing or learning or something. From that point on they’re dead.

— Katherine Dunn

I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can’t tell where I leave off and the books begin. I’m nobody. I’m a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutter.

— Katherine Dunn

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

Their bodies lifted up, clean and simple to her in the clear, unconscious awareness of each of their cells’ sensing that she would grunt out strong young.

— Katherine Dunn

I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the playground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me.

— Katherine Dunn

The old man is spread out on the worm buffet and.

— Katherine Dunn

I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him.

— Katherine Dunn

It was becoming apparent that Chick himself had only one ambition and that was to help everybody so much that they would love him.

— Katherine Dunn

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 a lollipop or a toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

— Katherine Dunn

Things were slipping on me – oranges at first – then everything.

— Katherine Dunn

I’d put myself to sleep only there’s nobody to do my job.

— Katherine Dunn
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