Top 70 Karen Thompson Walker Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

2. “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

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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

4. “There’s a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

14. “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

15. “Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

17. “Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

18. “But the past is long, and the future is short.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

29. “Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?”

— Karen Thompson Walker

30. “Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

31. “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. I like to think about how my parents’ lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

32. “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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

33. “His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

34. “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

35. “It strikes her again, how many of a child’s fears are just rational responses to the facts of everyday experience.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

37. “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

38. “If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I’m haunted by it.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

39. “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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

40. “No one is using the word quarantine, but Mei looks it up. From the Italian, quaranta giorni, forty days. Forty days: the period that ships were once required to wait before entering the port of Venice – time enough, they hoped, for a contagious disease to burn itself out.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

41. “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

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

— Karen Thompson Walker

43. “To close one’s eyes can be an act of survival.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

44. “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

45. “This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

46. “My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

47. “The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

48. “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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

49. “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.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

50. “And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dream.”

— Karen Thompson Walker