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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.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Stories
Urgency
Great
Absolutely
Writing
Writer
Even
Fiction
Way
Particular
Think
Story
Thinking
Write
Inevitability
Sense
Comedic

More quotes by Karen Russell

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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
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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.
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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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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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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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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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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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
Karen Russell
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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.
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