Quote

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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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Funny
Author
Writing
Hidden
Reflexively
Really
Requires
Accessing
Think
Aware
Shadowy
Thinking
Physical
Uncanny
Perhaps
Gradually
Becoming
Secrets
Secret
Territory

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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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My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
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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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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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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 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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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 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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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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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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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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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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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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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
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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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My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
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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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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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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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