Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

“A veces las historias más tristes son las que menos palabras requieren: no volví a saber nada de Seth Moreno.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

“ . . . perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“I bet things will turn out okay,” I said, gripped by an urge to say some cheerful thing—it rose up from my…

— Karen Thompson Walker

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because,…

— 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…

— Karen Thompson Walker

I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow,…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain…

— Karen Thompson Walker

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Karen Thompson Walker

Feeling earthquakes was part of growing up, and also preparing for them: doing earthquake drills, or having earthquake supplies. The looming feeling…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“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,…

— Karen Thompson Walker

I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological…

— 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…

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

— 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

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

“My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

“Doesn’t big news always leak before it’s meant to? Aren’t secrets usually spilled?”

— 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

“A finales de noviembre los días llegaron a tener cuarenta horas.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

“A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by…

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

“how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, neat as walnut shells.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

“A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or like autumn's final leaf.”

— 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