Katherine Dunn

"She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight."

"I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love."

"'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye."

"I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest."

"It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls …"

"Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum."

"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 canno…"

"The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles."