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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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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Thinking
Disaster
Sees
Eagerly
Thinks
Floods
Necessary
Wolves
Waiting
Storms
Father
Flood
Strong
Occasions
Find
Storm

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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
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Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
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My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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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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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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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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