Toad Quotes

“Perhaps it is different for others, but I came to this freedom suddenly, after long, if voluntary, subjugation. I am learning slowly what it is that I want. These trivial discoveries web my days with pleasure, and I am my own audience, and the audience of the goldfish, and of the scarred old toad in the garden.”
― Katherine Dunn, Toad

“I have an insidious conviction that between the onset of puberty and the age of thirty, people, like the hypothetical painting in the desert, do no exist without someone looking at them. I didn't. After thirty, I suppose we become a corporeal composite of what all of our viewers have witnessed, a kind of community gelatin.”
― Katherine Dunn, Toad

“There are mammalian females of many species that, in pressured circumstances, will devour their own young. These and other violent extremes I can comprehend and can, in some deep crack of my inner self, find some sympathy for. But that class of insensate savages that take the center of their Volcano Bar in one bite, separate from the enveloping chocolate, sets the small hairs of my body stiff and vibrating, causes waves of shock to traverse my entire nervous system, and sends venomous serpentine convolutions into my very dreams.”
― Katherine Dunn, Toad

“A sudden exhilaration, the foreign feel of the cold air on my body, set me leaping, galloping, and leaping again. An old chuckle, the secret life of my lungs, started up once more. The light, so soft, lavender in the shadows and gold on the rooftops, was intoxicating. My legs, mottled and pale, moved beneath me. The pavement stung and burned. The grit bit my large, tender feet, caught in the pads of my toes. I had planned to run and it was fun. Running is one of the signs of aberration in adults. It connotes fear, urgency, guilt. Only in special shoes and coordinated exercise suits is running acceptable.”
― Katherine Dunn, Toad