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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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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Real
Concern
Mind
Minds
Really
Dark
Think
Story
Motivations
Thinking
Stories
Contents
Littles
Concerns
Ever
Horror
Little
Motivation

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
Karen Russell
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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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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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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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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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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
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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
Karen Russell
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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.
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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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'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.
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