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101 " Help!” she screams to a sky full of crows. “He’s not actually from Europe! "
― Karen Russell , Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories
102 " Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot. "
103 " We stare at each other pop-eyed over the burlap sack and laugh as if we're afraid to stop. Somebody needs to say the magical, abracadabrical words that will turn tonight's crime into a joke. Marta has buttoned her wet sweater up to her neck. Petey's vanished. Now Raffy swirls the flashlights with true panic. Our joke keeps hatching and waddling forward in a snaky black procession, growing longer and less funny by the second, and this time nobody, not even Raffy, knows the punch line. "
― Karen Russell , St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
104 " Who is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue?" -- The Chief, Swamplandia "
― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!
105 " 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. "
106 " We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision. "
― Karen Russell , Orange World and Other Stories
107 " March 1. DEAR BABY: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock. "
108 " Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts. "
― Karen Russell , Sleep Donation
109 " I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could have vied with Jeanette for the number one spot, but I'd seen what happened if you gave in to your natural aptitudes. This wasn't like the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required to survive at the home. "
110 " There are twenty-two stalls in the Barn. Eleven of the stabled horses are, as far as Rutherford can ascertain, former presidents of the United States of America. The other stalls are occupied by regular horses, who give the presidents suspicious, sidelong looks. "
111 " I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them. "
112 " Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she’d have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these spells with a smile for us. "
113 " His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air. "
― Karen Russell , The Bog Girl
114 " Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:b lack, gray: black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry. "
115 " For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore. "
116 " What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water. "
117 " I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I’ll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision. "
118 " When you are a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them. "
119 " Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn’t you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, “sleep for all”—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness. "
120 " America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. "