Karen Russell > Quotes

“The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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!

“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!

“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.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.”
― Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

“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!

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.”
― Karen Russell (Author), St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories

“But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning.
“What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer.
The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth.

“You.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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.”
― Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories

“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!

“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!

“She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year...That's the way to do it, the grown up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”
― Karen Russell

“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!

“If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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!

“Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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!

“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!

“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!

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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