Top 70 Katherine Dunn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Every doorway, every intersection has a story.”

— Katherine Dunn

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

4. “Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.”

— Katherine Dunn

5. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

6. “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

7. “Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak.”

— Katherine Dunn

8. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

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

— Katherine Dunn

10. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

11. “Women who pay their own rent don’t have to be nice.”

— Katherine Dunn

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

14. “They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”

— Katherine Dunn

15. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

16. “Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.”

— Katherine Dunn

17. “I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

— Katherine Dunn

18. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

Featured in: Strong Quotes

19. “Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.”

— Katherine Dunn

20. “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

21. “What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?”

— Katherine Dunn

22. “Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You’ve seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him.” ARTURISM:.”

— Katherine Dunn

23. “It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.”

— Katherine Dunn

24. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

25. “We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”

— Katherine Dunn

26. “Let’s just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.”

— Katherine Dunn

27. “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

28. “The more people we exclude, the more people will want to join. That’s what exclusive means.”

— Katherine Dunn

29. “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

30. “I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.”

— Katherine Dunn

31. “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

32. “But the idea that women can’t take care of themselves still permeates our culture.”

— Katherine Dunn

33. “Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.”

— Katherine Dunn

34. “I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.”

— Katherine Dunn

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

— Katherine Dunn

36. “Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass.”

— Katherine Dunn

37. “Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.”

— Katherine Dunn

38. “This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.”

— Katherine Dunn

39. “You just want to know that you’re all right. You just want to feel all right.” And now he dives into the sneer. Arty’s sneer could flay a rhino. “That’s all you need other people’s love for!”

— Katherine Dunn

40. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

41. “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

42. “There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can’t die soon enough.”

— Katherine Dunn

43. “I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.”

— Katherine Dunn

44. “Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.”

— Katherine Dunn

45. “Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities.”

— Katherine Dunn

46. “Like colors or a spring tree against that kind ofblue sky that pulls your heart out through your eyes. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.”

— Katherine Dunn

47. “What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that’s always very flattering.”

— Katherine Dunn

48. “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.”

— Katherine Dunn

49. “I think that it’s really important to go away and come back.”

— Katherine Dunn

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

— Katherine Dunn