"It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff [whiskey]. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would heisitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn't look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young."
— Katherine Dunn

"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."
— Katherine Dunn (Geek Love: A Novel)

"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 anyones comfort" - Arturo Binewski."
— Katherine Dunn

"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

"The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. 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.
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

"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 (Geek Love: A Novel)

"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 (Geek Love: A Novel)

"Dear daughter, I won't try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Art was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you...

My job was to come back [from the convent] directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.
"
— Katherine Dunn (Geek Love: A Novel)

"...I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me."
— Katherine Dunn

"Roses are red,
And ready for plucking,
You're sixteen,
And ready for high school."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

""Hello, Halberstam," Owen says, walking by.
"Hello, Owen," I say, admiring the way he's styled and slicked back his hair, with a part so even and sharp it... devastates me and I make a mental note to ask him where he purchases his hair-care products, which kind of mousse he uses, my final guesses after mulling over the possibilities being Ten-X."
— Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

""Hip," I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely in a stall at Nell's---my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons."
— Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

"'What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement.

'Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.'

'Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out.

'Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?'

'It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head.

'I'm not gonna wear a fucking condom,' McDermott announces.

'I have read this article I've Xeroxed,' Van Patten says, 'and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.'

'Guys just cannot get it.'

'Well, not white guys.'"
— Bret Easton Ellis

"This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way."
— Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel)