Karen Thompson Walker famous quotes

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Disappointment #Age #Would Be

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Editors #Reader

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Beautiful #Writing #College

It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Book #Attention #Chance

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?
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Motivation #Inspiration #Focus

With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here's a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic. A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn't it?
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Eye #Heart #Space

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Writing #College #Virginia

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Jobs #Doe #Stories

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Growing Up #Earthquakes #Feelings

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Creating #Ordinary #Hot

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Beautiful #Writing #Night

In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Thinking #Worry #Kind

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Years #Looks #Fiction

Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Running #Riding #Subway

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Jobs #Fall #Writing

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Moving #Writing #Editing

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Christian #Miracle #Different

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Bravery #Kind #Certain

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Book #Years #Opposites

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Thinking #California #Miracle

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Earthquakes #Ideas #Haunting

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Coffee #Writing #Sunday

I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Reading #Sunday #Years

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Trying #President #Fiction

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Ordinary #Pleasure #Ordinary Life

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Love Is #Joy #Feelings

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Degrees #Way #Persevere

If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Scary #Stories #Newspapers

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination ... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Fear #Play #Imagination

Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Motivation #Inspiration #Knowing

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Stories #Sometimes

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Creepy #Abundance #Turns

Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Regret #Speed

But the past is long, and the future is short.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Past #Long

I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Lying #Father #Fall

Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Decay #Sometimes #Proof

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Father #Storm #Eras

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Real #Worry #Different

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Beautiful #Girl #Summer

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Morning #Writing #Mind

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Book #Writing #Feels

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.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Sweet #Children #Thinking

Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.
-- Karen Thompson Walker

#Closets #Dangerous