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Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Place
Desk
Become
Demanding
Self
Desks
Writing
Flexibility
Perfection
Necessary
Joy
Spacious
Stop
Playfulness

More quotes by Karen Russell

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Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
Karen Russell
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I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
Karen Russell
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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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.
Karen Russell
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Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell