Top 100 Karen Russell Quotes

#1. This is it, the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning longitude and latitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #12274
#2. Somethings you know right away to be final- when you lose your last baby tooth ... Other times, you have to work out the milestone via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I'd just blown through my last-ever wednesday with Mom on the day after she died.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #48705
#3. I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #81827
#4. Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices,
but because of the silence that is in it.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #88811
#5. Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #94998
#6. So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #175734
#7. It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #177675
#8. 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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #184623
#9. The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #194762
#10. For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #244152
#11. Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #266180
#12. The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #299171
#13. This new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #301394
#14. Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this
France or the Bible.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #311865
#15. Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #403504
#16. I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #438296
#17. 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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #458341
#18. Our mother performed in starlight.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #463299
#19. My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #479163
#20. It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #491690
#21. I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #527038
#22. When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #576551
#23. 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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #621374
#24. Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?
Kiwi, Swamplandia!

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #632447
#25. She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, "I wanna go home! I wanna go home!" Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #654965
#26. 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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #658746
#27. Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #680494
#28. Forever, just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #725187
#29. I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #776807
#30. He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstream of life, smiling and saying, "Pardon me," "After you,"and "No, thank you.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #783355
#31. I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #786205
#32. He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he's still whole.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #788138
#33. The Avalanche," peacemaker Rachel recites, "is very important. It's a privilege to sing it. It's a celebration of our past." Everybody around the table smiles at her.
"Yeah? Well, I've seen how easily the past can get rewritten." I glare at Mr. Oamaru. "Lyrics change. New authors come along.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #828698
#34. Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She's alone with Annie.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #846213
#35. I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #965462
#36. My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #968102
#37. When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #976562
#38. I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #993043
#39. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1005376
#40. And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1018998
#41. If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don't go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It's stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1019899
#42. The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1028510
#43. I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1033585
#44. I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1045803
#45. The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don't want to come all that way and miss the game.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1051751
#46. It's unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. There's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1081782
#47. Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1111015
#48. The baby turtles are turning away from the ocean. It's easy to see why. The black waves lap up the moonbeams, and the starlight on the inky surface of the water gives off such a pale glow when you compare it to the megawatt flashlights that Raffy is swirling in hypnotic circles.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1114531
#49. His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1130184
#50. It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1132987
#51. Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1136923
#52. Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1158948
#53. I just want to tell her that I'm sorry, Wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice. And it's clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1179234
#54. The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1207023
#55. My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1215584
#56. I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1216834
#57. The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1232271
#58. Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. "Help!" she screams to a sky full of crows. "He's not actually from Europe!

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1237027
#59. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1241499
#60. At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. (spoken by narrator Ava Bigtree in Swamplandia!)

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1262145
#61. When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1277942
#62. As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1310715
#63. Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1317403
#64. My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1318902
#65. Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1333226
#66. Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he'd called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1349703
#67. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1355798
#68. We met every morning, still bearded with toast crumbs from our continental breakfasts.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1369696
#69. I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1399515
#70. Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1400694
#71. I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1425662
#72. Her name in a stranger's mouth was a resurrection; however briefly, she was alive with him again again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1432776
#73. But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1436052
#74. But I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1438744
#75. On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature. The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in how to feel.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1443406
#76. What bird are you calling?' I ask, finally, when I can't stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. 'You.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1452666
#77. the gravity of wound to fist

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1454722
#78. I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1476371
#79. We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1518744
#80. I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anything.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1519437
#81. Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1538205
#82. If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1550800
#83. It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1554703
#84. But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I'm learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1559799
#85. I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1561476
#86. I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1569507
#87. It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1571164
#88. (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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1577496
#89. Turn the lights of please, Ava, she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult's breath turned the world as small and dark as a boat hold.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1581003
#90. Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes 'good' from 'bad' luck.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1627034
#91. Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1699086
#92. America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, ... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1705866
#93. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1734861
#94. Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of .)
Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1757457
#95. 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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1765047
#96. But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1766190
#97. Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1767139
#98. 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.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1803571
#99. Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1806653
#100. Increasingly, Sawtooth's own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl's hands, ...

Karen Russell

Karen Russell Quotes #1875301

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