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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.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Language
Voices
Freaky
House
Fresh
Tin
Work
Magazines
Delivering
Love
Excellent
Port
People
Storm
Addition
Committed
Magazine
Writers
Publishing
Voice
Established
Unfailingly

More quotes by Karen Russell

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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.
Karen Russell
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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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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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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My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
Karen Russell
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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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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 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
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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
Karen Russell
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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
Karen Russell
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For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
Karen Russell
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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
Karen Russell
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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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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
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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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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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.
Karen Russell