Aging & Wisdom Quote by Katherine Dunn

Language is framed here less as art than as contraband: a tool that can incriminate or exonerate depending on how you slip it past authority. Dunn’s “magic” isn’t sentimental. It’s the practical sorcery a child learns early, when adults treat speech like evidence and tone like motive. “Some words got me into trouble” suggests the shock of discovering that meaning isn’t just what you intend; it’s what power decides it is. The flip side - “others got me out” - makes clear why writers become writers: not to decorate reality, but to negotiate with it.

The subtext is a moral education in rhetoric. Dunn implies that language is never neutral; it’s transactional, strategic, sometimes even a little criminal. There’s also a tiny, delicious cynicism: if words can spring you from trouble, then “truth” is partly a matter of phrasing. That’s a novelist’s origin story, and it aligns with Dunn’s fascination with outsiders and the ways society polices bodies, class, and deviance. People on the margins don’t get the luxury of naive speech; they learn quickly that the right sentence can soften a judge, disarm a bully, or reframe a shame.

The sentence works because it compresses a whole theory of culture into childhood memory. We’re asked to recognize how early we’re trained into linguistic performance - apologies, excuses, charm, “correct” diction - and how that training creates both vulnerability and agency. Dunn’s “magic” is the spell of survival: words as leverage, words as disguise, words as escape hatch.