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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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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Permit
Generations
Reunions
Food
Truce
Feeling
Picnic
Family
Picnics
Feelings
Suspension
Love
Reunion
Permits

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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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There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
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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.
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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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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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 want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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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.
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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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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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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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