Quotes from book
Geek Love

Geek Love
Katherine Dunn

Geek Love is a novel by Katherine Dunn, published completely by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989. Dunn published parts of the novel in Mississippi Mud Book of Days and Looking Glass Bookstore Review . It was a finalist for the National Book Award.The novel is the story of a traveling carnival run by Aloysius "Al" Binewski and his wife "Crystal" Lil, and their children, seen through the eyes of their daughter Olympia who writes the family history for her daughter Miranda. When the business begins to fail, the couple devise an idea to breed their own freak show, using various drugs and radioactive material to alter the genes of their children. The results are Arturo , a boy with flippers for hands and feet; Electra and Iphigenia , Siamese Twins; Olympia , a hunchbacked albino dwarf; and Fortunato , the normal-looking baby of the family who has telekinetic powers.

“She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

“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 anyone's comfort”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“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 book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“He must love me, i thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love, but it seemed true. Unavoidable.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“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 book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“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 book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

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

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.
Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

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

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

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

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

“The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, and drink it very slowly.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

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

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

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

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

“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 freakish.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

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