Katherine Dunn Quotes

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

We're the only species who follow unstable leaders. This is true - it has little to do with America - around the world, pack leaders are unstable. Animals don't follow that.

Every dog might wish to be Dog One, but like us, most dogs want membership in the group even more than they want supremacy over others.

The meekest of animals will fight bravely when it is backed against a wall, for it has nothing left to lose. A poor man is more deadly than a rich man because he puts less value on his own life.

Those who think must govern those that toil.

The last couple years they've been good, but it's just a great group of guys, and they were willing to take the vision that we gave them in the beginning of the season, and we started off really well, which I think helped. But as I mentioned, Andre's sacrifice, David Lee's sacrifice, their willingness to accept roles and keep pushing really was the key to the whole thing.

It doesn't always turn out. It's not always a happy ending when sometimes you say things that you think, and it goes against the grain of the larger group.

Putting together a really strong unifying team was an absolute condition. When that fell away, I think that Michael [Gove] felt things had changed.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

Dog's owners don't call me. It's their neighbors or family members. We call them the whistleblowers, but it's more like the pack. It's making sure that one pack member gets in line. Before it was the owners, now it's the community.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

The core of Animal House was about prejudice, about equality, and about inclusion/exclusion. It was about a group of people who were together and anything went. Anybody who wanted in could get it in. Then there was that other group that nobody could get in, unless they were white, and just alike. It was very representative of the culture in the '60s, '50s, and '40s in America.

The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.

Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates.

I want to be aware of how I treat others, not thinking too highly of myself to be a servant in a culture which tries to place me on a throne that only God should sit.

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

I probably could have a hip-hop-style entourage of 40 people coming with me to the club or whatever, and I don't do that. And I think sometimes maybe I should. It just makes things easier - if you don't like being by yourself, maybe just don't do it ever.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

We're social animals; we're meant to be together, but we were never necessarily meant to be together without being together. That was never the plan, I don't think.