Lily King famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.
-- Lily King

#Fall #Communication #Attention
I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.
-- Lily King

#Communication #Writing #Active
I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.
-- Lily King

#People #Way
I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.
-- Lily King

#Three #Human Nature #My Family
Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?
-- Lily King

#Illusion #Disappoint
Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
-- Lily King

#Self #Investigation
Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
-- Lily King

#Notebook #Writing #School
I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group.
-- Lily King

#Strong #Childhood #Feelings
It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes.
-- Lily King

#Mistake #Rough Drafts #Want
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.
-- Lily King

#Writing #Culture #Hell
I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.
-- Lily King

#Children #People #House
I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.
-- Lily King

#Real #Virginia #Language
When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.
-- Lily King

#Country #War #School
I've also done things that put me in odd situations.
-- Lily King

#Done #Odd #Situation
There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.
-- Lily King

#Bats #Delicacy #Tribes
Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.
-- Lily King

#Reading #Grandmother #Way
Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.
-- Lily King

#Writing #Would Be #Form
Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.
-- Lily King

#Book #Writing #Character
To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.
-- Lily King

#Childhood #Feelings #Different
When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.
-- Lily King

#People #Situation #Angry
I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
-- Lily King

#Mother #Children #Father

You may also like:

Anthony Doerr
Author of novels
Carolyn Chute
Writer
Elizabeth Kolbert
Journalist
Eula Biss
Fiction writer
Gregory Bateson
Anthropologist
Hermione Lee
College Professor
Jenny Offill
Novelist
Margaret Mead
Cultural Anthropologist
Menachem Begin
Former Prime Minister of Israel
Paula McLain
Author
Richard Blanco
Poet
Richard Russo
Novelist
Roz Chast
Cartoonist
Ruth Benedict
Anthropologist
Sara Nelson
Editor
Phil Klay
Writer