Kathryn Harrison Quotes
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I think in terms of the parents that I had, I sort of drew a bad hand, or bad karma; who knows? And I did have a family that was complicated, with some quite eccentric members. So there was a lot of grist there.
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I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.
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A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.
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I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household.
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I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.
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I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.
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Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.
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When I was eleven, my mother gave me Robert K. Massie's 'Nicholas and Alexandra.' It was the first 'grownup' book I read, and I loved it.
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It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty.
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Lives that are so conspicuous have a claustrophobic feeling. Once you're in charge of running a country, you're under scrutiny all the time. That's a trap.
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Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation.
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The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history.
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Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.
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I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right.
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I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University.
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It's hard for me not to have a great deal of compassion for the last Romanov family because, really, I don't know if a politically savvy ruler would have been able to make the situation turn out much differently.
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The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable.
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Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.
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I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.
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'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one.