Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

• ...gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on.
  
• Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twists her toward all that the world calls freakish.
  
• 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.
  
• " You must have wished a million times to be normal."
  "No."
  "No?"
  "I've wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I've wished for a fish's tail instead of legs. I've wished to be more special."
  "Not normal?"
  "Never."
• A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.
• 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.
• We need that warm adult stupidity.  Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reachers of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all.  We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
• "Roxanne Tuxbury always rides a kick-start cycle," explained Horst, "and the thighs on that woman are as long and strong as her laugh, which you can pretty much pick up in Arkansas if the wind is right."
• "So, let's get the truth here! You don't want to stop eating! You love to eat! You don't want to be thin! You don't want to be beautiful! You don't want people to love you! All you really want is to know that you're all right! That's what can give you peace!
  
  "If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I'd be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I'd worry did somebody love me! I'd have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself."
  
  "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 can't. You can not be happy. Because, you poor darling, you believe them..."
• 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. There 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. There are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.