Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Public
Bathroom
Illicit
Reading
Dry
Tubs
Read
Younger
Shoe
Felt
Vulnerable
Lock
Also
Deeply
Closet
Used
Shoes
Closets
Private
Thrilling
Fans
Locks

More quotes by Karen Russell

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
Karen Russell
Image
If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
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
Image
It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
Karen Russell
Image
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
Image
Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
Karen Russell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
Karen Russell
Image
For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
Karen Russell
Image
It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
Karen Russell