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
Secret
Territory
Funny
Author
Writing
Hidden
Reflexively
Really
Requires
Accessing
Think
Aware
Shadowy
Thinking
Physical
Uncanny
Perhaps
Gradually
Becoming
Secrets

More quotes by Karen Russell

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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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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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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.
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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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Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
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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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For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
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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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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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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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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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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
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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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My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
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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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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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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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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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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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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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