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161 " It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. "
― Karen Russell , Sleep Donation
162 " How could you make a mistake when you had one option? "
― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!
163 " Rutherford arches his neck toward her outstretched hand. Freckles of light float across his patchy hindquarters. He licks the girl’s palm according to a code that he’s worked out: - - - -, which means that he is Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States of America, and that she should alert the local officials. “Ha-ha!” the girl laughs. “That tickles. "
― Karen Russell , Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories
164 " The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him. "
165 " 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. "
166 " ...a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen "
― Karen Russell , Orange World and Other Stories
167 " 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. "
168 " (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. "
169 " We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest. "
― Karen Russell , St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
170 " It occurred to me that, given the life span of a moth, one kid’s twitch must take a year to complete. "
171 " We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. "
172 " My father has the “settler’s scar,” a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow. "
173 " The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls “the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall”: a glass window. "
174 " My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her. "
175 " Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops. "
176 " when you’re raising weather by artificial means, it’s hard to pretend you don’t have a hand in the change "
177 " People talk about heredity as if it’s linear and vertical. Dead people pass things “down” to the young. "
178 " I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories. "
179 " Often I wonder to what extent a mortal’s love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I’ll never quite understand. And lately I’ve been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does. "
180 " Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an “imperial vocation. "