Karen Thompson Walker Quotes
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I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
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How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.
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We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.
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As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.
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I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.
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Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.
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But the past is long, and the future is short.
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In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.
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I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee.
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Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief.
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I'm an only child, and I think one of the sweet things about that is that my parents are really interested in every aspect of my life.
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Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?
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Shortly after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake, I read that the earthquake had affected the rotation of the earth, shortening the length of our 24-hour day. Even though the change was extremely slight - only a few microseconds - I found the idea incredibly haunting.
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Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
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There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.
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Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.
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It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.
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I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
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I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.
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It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
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I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.
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Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
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I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.
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I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment.
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To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
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Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.
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Feeling earthquakes was part of growing up, and also preparing for them: doing earthquake drills, or having earthquake supplies. The looming feeling was part of my life. My experience of earthquakes has always been more the fear of them, or the possibility.
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I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.
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I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.
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Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.
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