Quote

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.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Cards
Pressed
Expectations
Perfume
Dance
Expectation
Fanned
Wall
Guests
Perimeter
Brain
Doomed
Hem
Party
Walls
Hugged
Heart
Floor
Tugging
Hopes
Lace

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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
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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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Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes good from bad luck.
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And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
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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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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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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.
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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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My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
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I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.
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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'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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I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.
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Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.
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I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.
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I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.
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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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