Literary Birthday – 1 May – Karen Thompson Walker

Happy Birthday, Karen Thompson Walker, born 1 May 1980.

Karen Thompson Walker Quotes

1. Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. The only thing you have to do in this life is die…everything else is a choice.
5. 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.
6. Doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?
7. I loved working in book publishing but writing was the closest thing to my heart, so I just made time for it. I’m a morning person so giving up an hour’s sleep was easier than staying up late.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 is an American writer. She is the author of The Age of Miracles.

Source for photograph

Author’s publicity page

https://sites.prh.com/karen-thompson-walker

Photo: © Dan Hawk Photography

by Amanda Patterson

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