"I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate."
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Quote collection
Karen Russell quotes (page 4 of 4)
77 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful."
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"You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu."
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"Could we betray our parents by going back to them?"
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"My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary."
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"I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard."
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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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"So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum."
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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."
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"But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again."
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"Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot."
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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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"The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle."
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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 want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures."
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"What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials."
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"Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest."
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