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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
Karen Russell
Image
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
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
My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
Karen Russell
Image
Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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
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
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
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
Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
Karen Russell
Image
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
Image
I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.
Karen Russell
Image
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
Image
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
Karen Russell