Karen Elson Quotes

The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.

I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

It is a very beautiful story, 'The Crow.' It is a very tragic story with huge emotional themes.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.

American folk songs were about tragedy, right? They were about suffering and tragedy, and a lot of my songs are about that, even though they were misunderstood.

Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.

There are no deliverers. They're all dead.

Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes and no. He who led the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets; no food; no one knows where they are, perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

You rarely hear women crying in Grozney. They have cried their eyes out long ago.

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

'Somnia' is a story about loss and, I guess, what you're willing to do to have closure and try and feel whole again. It's a story of redemption in a sense. I don't want to give too much away, but it's a heartbreaking story that's incredibly terrifying.

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.

My humor is traced with dark - I've got dark patches all over the place.

Every time you turn on the TV, you see some kind of heartbreaking story.

We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.

Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.

I just want people to not assume their story is over, especially when maybe they have somebody in their life that they've given up on or they think it's hopeless.

I always write about war, love, death, and injustice. There's plenty of that around, so I never run out of ideas.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

A lot of joking stems from a very dark place a bit.

People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.

Hope is everything. Once you've lost that, you don't really have much.

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.