Karen Thompson Walker Quotes

When one's life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.

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

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

But most houses in California were built without roots, leaving us trapped above ground with the light.

But time moves in only one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.

Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images never leave the mind.

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.

So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?

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

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

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

Something similar had happened once to the bees. This was only a few years before the slowing began. Millions of honeybees had died. Hives found abandoned, inexplicably empty. Whole colonies had vanished in the breeze. No one ever did conclusively pinpoint the cause of the collapse.

They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.

the day we passed the wheat point. Now it was official: Wheat could no longer grow on this planet without

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.

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

This had become a game of ours. We were serious kids made more so by the times.

The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.

It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived.

I knew everything about the back of that head - the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon.

Sara is still a little in her dream--something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She is wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.

Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?

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.

I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't expect at all.

Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes.
But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here.

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?

The mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.

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

But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest.

This was the first of the solar superstorms, triggered

They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream.

On dark days like that one, the library windows looked lit up like an aquarium, the inhabitants on display for all the other kids to see: here the most exotic fish, the lonely, the unloved, the weird.

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.

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.

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

Antidepressants were swimming in the rivers, and our bloodstreams were just as polluted as the waterways.

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.

Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.

I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise.

For days afterward, a series of magical thoughts flew through my mind. For instance, it seemed somehow surprising that the hours continued to pass in spite of what I knew. It was almost shocking that time did not, in fact, stop.

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

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.

It did seem amazing, in that moment, that there had ever existed a creature with the power to fly.

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

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.

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.

To close one's eyes can be an act of survival.

I felt an urgency like love.

She looked lonely through the lens of my telescope, like one of those faraway stars, still visible to our eyes but no longer really there.

They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea. No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation - that's what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn't every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?

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.

I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.

Worry, she often reminds her patients, is a kind of creativity. Fear is an act of the imagination.

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

Sometimes death is a proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve. We were young and we were hungry. We were strong and and growing stronger, so healthy we were bursting.

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.

Gabby's house was the same model as ours but reversed. Her bedroom was the same bedroom as mine, the dimensions exactly equal. For twelve years, we'd slept between walls erected by the same construction crews and looked out on the same fading cul-de-sac through identically sized windows. Grown under similar conditions, we had become very different, two specimens of girlhood, now diverging.

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.

How quaint the old twenty-four-hour clock began to look to our eyes, how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, as neat as walnut shells. How had we believed, we wondered, in such simplistic things?

Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska ... But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote

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

The boys turn quiet and they drink even more - cheap beer bought with fake IDs. They keep their hands in their pockets those first few days and just try to stay out of the way of the girls. It is as if the boys can sense it, even in those girls, in their easy closeness and their interlocking arms: the whole history of women and suffering, the generations of practice at grief.

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 were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.

After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known
no law of physics can account for desire.

Art thrives in times of uncertainty.

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.

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.

What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that he gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes. It was not nearly so clean and smooth in there as it seemed. Other lives were houses in that mind, parallel worlds. Maybe we're all built a little that way. But most of us drop hints. Most of us leave clues. My father was more careful.

The real catastrophes are always different-unimaginable, unprepared for, unknown

He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

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.

One by one, the minutes poured in - and even a trickle, as we have come to understand, can eventually add up to a flood.

Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But 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.

I bet things will turn out okay," I said, gripped by an urge to say some cheerful thing - it rose up from my throat like a cough. "I bet it will be fine.

But doesn't every precious era feel like fiction once it's gone? After a while, certain vestigial sayings are all that remain. Decades after the invention of the automobile, for instance, we continue to warn each other not to 'put the cart before the horse'. So, too, we do still have 'day'dreams and 'night'mares, and the early-morning clock hours are still known colloquially (if increasing mysteriously) as 'the crack of dawn'. Similarly, even as they grew apart, my parents never stopped calling each other 'sweetheart'.

It was the lifeless middle of a bright white night. Our

...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fail.

Time moved differently for us that spring: A string of long afternoons was as good as a year.

She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day.

Something was happening to the earth's magnetic field.

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

We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.

Past, present, future - a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.

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

But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth.

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

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 seeing was just age, a gradual shift that I'd failed to register. I sometimes felt the urge to study recent photographs of her in order to locate the exact point in time when she had come to look so weary.

Don't believe everything you hear, okay? You're a smart girl. You can read between the lines.

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

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