Home > Author > Karen Russell
1 " There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives. "
― Karen Russell , St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
2 " I dropped the candies into the children's bags, thinking: You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories. "
― Karen Russell , Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories
3 " Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. "
― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!
4 " Even if she’d [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths [Ava’s pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man. "
5 " I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere. "
6 " There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over. "
7 " Wait, that’s your idea? That’s your expert advice? You’re going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You’re going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics, asshole. If they wanted that pep talk, they could just hang out inside a mall elevator. "
― Karen Russell
8 " 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 , The Bog Girl
9 " The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops. "
― Karen Russell , Sleep Donation
10 " the gravity of wound to fist "
11 " 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. "
12 " The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. "
13 " My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. "
14 " Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. "
15 " Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light… "
16 " My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses. "
17 " It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams. "
18 " No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret. "
19 " Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself. "
20 " When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them. "
