Quotes by Karen Thompson Walker

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

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

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

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 b...

Karen Thompson Walker

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

Karen Thompson Walker

I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn't sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seein...

Karen Thompson Walker

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 ...

Karen Thompson Walker

The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.

Karen Thompson Walker

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

Karen Thompson Walker

We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain.

Karen Thompson Walker

But the past is long, and the future is short.

Karen Thompson Walker

I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they ...

Karen Thompson Walker

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man.

Karen Thompson Walker

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

Karen Thompson Walker

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 ...

Karen Thompson Walker

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

Karen Thompson Walker

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

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

Karen Thompson Walker

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

Karen Thompson Walker