Quote

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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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Felt
Catholic
Nearby
Part
Ocean
Tropical
Really
Green
Embedded
Mystery
Mysteries
Tree
Giant
Banyan
Imagination
Giants
Incubator
Growing
Landscape
Insanely
Church
Trees
Seamless

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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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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
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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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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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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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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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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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Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
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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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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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Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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