Karen Russell Quotes

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don't want to come all that way and miss the game.

Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long.

Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.

We don't have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.

Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this
France or the Bible.

She's dead. She's dead.

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.

Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.

The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you'd lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

Who is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue?
The Chief, Swamplandia

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?
Kiwi, Swamplandia!

Could we betray our parents by going back to them?

Our mother performed in starlight.

Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.

As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.

I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

But until we are old ladies- a cypress age, a Sawtooth age- I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

How could you make a mistake when you had one option?

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

(I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.

I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

We met every morning, still bearded with toast crumbs from our continental breakfasts.

Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.

Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens".

Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot.

He tried to scrub children's vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius.

People are symptoms of dreams

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!

I haf the sownd of more words butt i coud not remember the shaps of the letters.

If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.

Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails - and then right at his nadir, he'd agreed to an "avant" haircut performed by Cousin Steve.

His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices,
but because of the silence that is in it.

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

the gravity of wound to fist

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

I didn't realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another - bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

This new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it.

You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it's a salad.

My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.