Quotes by Andrea Barrett - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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I've never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn't even go to my prom.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Prom
Life My Life Never
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I think the landscape you grow up in probably does mark you in ways you don't even understand.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Landscape
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I grew up on Cape Cod. We didn't live right on the water, but I could walk to it and did every day.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Cape
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Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Dark
Evil
Gothic
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I'm not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence ... are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Different
Facts
Way
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It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Carpe Diem
People
Writing
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When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
New Territory
Notes
Primary Source
Territory
Randomly
Source Material
Specialized
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Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated by her memorable characters and the perfectly paced revelations of their surprising relationships.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Character
Eye
Memorable
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I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Friends
Closest
Closest Friends
Human Nature
Obsessive
Touch
Characters
Trait
Writers
Project
Particularly
Hugely
Onto
Scientists
Tend
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Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Teacher
Dear
Dear Friend
Intense
Reader
Good Relationship Great
Drafts
Good Writer
Hers
Reads
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My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure - it was a very unintellectual household - but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that's how I started to read.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Divorced
Household
Pleasure
Family Father Mother
Largely
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The cure until the late 1940s, when there was an antibiotic discovered for tuberculosis, was basically rest. It was fresh, cold air, lots of food - five meals a day, lots of sleep, not very much talking, and for some people, complete stillness.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Air
Cold
Five
Late
Meals
Sleep
Stillness
Talking
Tuberculosis
Food Day People
Lots
Basically
Complete
Cure
Discovered
Rest
Fresh
Some People
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All my life, books have felt alive; some more so than people, or rather, some people. Alive - this has to do with me, I know, and not the books - in a way that some people aren't. Alive as teachers, alive as minds, alive as imaginative triggers.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Alive
Imaginative
Triggers
Life Me My Life
Life Me People
Teachers
Minds
Some People
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I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Abstract
Details
Always World People
World People Way
Always World Live
Artists
Certain Way
Heads
Musicians
Physical
Physical World
Scientists
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Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Conflict
Disease
Medicine
Policy
Public Health
Social Policy
Exists
Group
Infectious
Intersection
Safer
Tendency
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I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Fiction Writers
Hard Way
Naturally
Recommend
Short Stories
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For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Creation
Dialogue
Familiar
Materials
New Things
Painter
Discover
New Material
Potter
Sculptor
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In the story I eventually called 'Archangel' and published in 2008, Eudora MacEachern, working as an assistant to a surgeon at a hospital in Archangel, one night finds outside the gates an exhausted and frostbitten soldier crouched over the reins of a pony sleigh carrying the body of another soldier.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Exhausted
Gates
Reins
Soldier
Assistant
Carrying
Finds
Hospital
Pony
Published
Surgeon
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I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world. We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's part of why we write. We feel we don't fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we're not of it. You don't need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Home
Moving
Writing
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By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That's actually when I started writing, although I didn't think of it then as something I might someday do.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Teacher
Class
English Teacher
Fabulous
High School
Horrible
Junior High
Skip
Someday
Sophomore Year
Teacher School High School
Afterwards
Although
Student
Junior
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The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Data
Freshness
Gathering
Heyday
Natural History
Pursuit
Mid
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I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Battle
Constant
Time Mother Always
More Or Less
Normal Person
Passionately
Searching
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I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and be some kind of a lady Darwin someplace. It turned out that I'm really awful at science and that I have no gift for actually doing science myself. But I'm very interested in others who practice science and in the stories of science.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Biology
Undergraduate
Darwin
Lady
Someplace
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Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.
Andrea Barrett / Novelist
Breathing
Self
Writing
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