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Swamplandia! QUOTES

Swamplandia! QUOTES

1 " Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

2 " 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. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

3 " the gravity of wound to fist "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

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

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

5 " 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. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

6 " 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… "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

7 " 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. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

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

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

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

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

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

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

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

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

12 " I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he'd just hurt. I don't understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

13 " Even in her trances, even while possessed, my sister was very shrewd about her prospects. A fantasy would collapse like a wave against the rocks of her intelligence. Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

14 " 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 , Swamplandia!

15 " 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 , Swamplandia!

16 " THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU! "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

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 , Swamplandia!

18 " 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 , Swamplandia!

19 " 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. I was acquainted with it, this bright spot, because once or twice before it had taken over during my fiercest wrestling matches. Encapsuled in this pinhead lived a brute, a swimmer, a thirst, a hunger, a fire-hater, a grass-jumper. The same as anybody’s, probably, as any living person’s. I’m sure that yours and mine would push up for air with the same force:mass ratio. Would fin up, would open its frog mouth for air, would claw up, would gallop. This new self had all the personality of a muscle. Its haunches charged ahead of my heartbeat, leaving a wake of blood in my ears: KICK. KICK. KICK. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!

20 " The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell. "

― Karen Russell , Swamplandia!