Katherine Dunn Quotes

It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me

I suppose that it's my impulse to mine, as a writer, these scary parts of ourselves and the world.

I was born 10 years old.

so your father told you once that you were his princess you won't see the castle you cannot find your prince and now you've grown a lot and your dress don't fit right your daddy's not a hero he stole your chariot so here you are in pieces trying to prove to us it's real the softness of your smile and the lies you want to feel the scales beneath your skin are showing off today there's evil in your heart and it wants out to play there's evil in your heart and it wants out to play there's evil in your heart and I have made a home here for me you'll burn it down with your fantasy

I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood.

Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.

And this is what we called our childhoods. Little more than a dress rehearsal for adding our digits to the butcher's bill of war.

He has a spirit-a soul- and therfore a choice. I will belive that Aurox will chose Light, even if Darkness resides within him. None of us is entirely good. Or evil.

I don't think comedy comes from hotbeds of doing shtick. I think it usually comes from some kind of childhood humiliation or darkness.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.

Evil exists in us all, Torak. Some fight it. Some feed it. That's how it's always been.

They want you to think that darkness or evil is only something that gets inflicted on you by the outside world, but I know better, and I think the freak does, too. Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I've spent away from my family and loved ones, I'm starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There's a darkness inside of me that I'm only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it's starting to scare me.

Back to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.

When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.

Evil's lurking, I can see him smirking.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

I was the owner of my own darkness.

I remember watching the mascara tears flood the ivories and I thought, "It's OK to be sad." I've been trained to love my darkness.

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?