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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.

Katherine Dunn

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Katherine Dunn
Age: 70 †
Born: 1945
Born: October 24
Died: 2016
Died: May 11
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Radio Personality
Sportswriter
Writer
Garden City
Kansas
Katherine Karen Dunn
Forget
Crucial
Also
Damage
Restrain
Human
Survival
Defect
Humans
Tend
Monstrous
Tools
Contain
Capacity
Defects
Violence
Aggression
Struggle
Tool

More quotes by Katherine Dunn

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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
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But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.
Katherine Dunn
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Freedom within any kind of social structure - the whole issue of exactly what the human animal is - is an ongoing preoccupation of mine. And I certainly don't think I've come to the end of that exploration, and with any luck, I never will. But I'm very curious about exactly what kind of beast we are. We're so complicated.
Katherine Dunn
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Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up.
Katherine Dunn
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Just as a snowflakewent on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, thepumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, myfather's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea.
Katherine Dunn
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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.
Katherine Dunn
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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
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In my next life, I plan to be a more respectable creature. For now, this is what is given to us. So I don't know - I think we're all freaks at heart. I think some people strive desperately to be normal, and I think other people strive to be abnormal.
Katherine Dunn
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We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
Katherine Dunn
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Were also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.
Katherine Dunn
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Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
Katherine Dunn
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It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.' Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.
Katherine Dunn
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My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.
Katherine Dunn
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I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
Katherine Dunn
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But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.
Katherine Dunn
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Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.
Katherine Dunn
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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
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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
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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
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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