Daily Inspiration Quote by Katherine Dunn

Cults "haunting" her is doing double duty: it’s a confession of fascination and a claim of proximity. Dunn isn’t positioning cults as a distant pathology; she frames them as a recurring pressure point in the human psyche, something that keeps returning because it answers a need. The line’s real charge comes from the phrase "structure and source". She’s not chasing the lurid aesthetics of cult stories - robes, communes, charismatic leaders - so much as the architecture: the mechanisms that make surrender feel like relief, even like virtue.

"I wanted to explore the fundamental notion" signals a novelist’s ambition to treat cultic devotion less as a niche phenomenon and more as a model for how people outsource agency. That’s the subtext: cults aren’t aberrations; they’re exaggerated versions of a common bargain. You trade the burden of choice for the comfort of certainty. Responsibility becomes a weight you can hand to a system, a leader, a doctrine, even an idea of destiny.

The quiet sting is in "outside power". Dunn keeps it deliberately unspecific, widening the target past any single religion or movement toward whatever authority offers a clean narrative: political movements, self-help empires, family systems, celebrity, even "common sense". As a novelist, her intent is diagnostic, not moralizing. She’s asking why relinquishing responsibility can feel like salvation, and what that bargain costs: complexity, doubt, and finally the self.