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When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Hard
Innocuous
Secrets
Kill
Ones
Secret
Tell
Keep
Kids

More quotes by Karen Russell

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I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.
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So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.
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I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
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Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
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I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
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My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.
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My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
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Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.
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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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I'm not going anywhere, she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
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No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
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