Karen Russell Quotes

“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

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

“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

“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

“Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens".”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier- ... -and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment: when I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I'm flying, I'm rushing to meet my own reflection-”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“We sang at the chapel annexed to the home every morning. We understood that this was the humans' moon, the place for howling beyond purpose. Not for mating, not for hunting, not for fighting, not for anything but the sound itself. And we'd howl along with the choir, hurling every pitted thing within us at the stained glass.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Could we betray our parents by going back to them?”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“We know that Rangi can at least mutter because Digger Gibson says he used to talk to the bear. In his group home for orphaned Moa boys, Rangi had a pet cinnamon bear. I saw her once. She was just a wet-nosed cub, a cuff of pure white around her neck. Rangi found her on the banks of the Waitiki River and walked her around on a leash. He filed her claws and fed her tiny, smelly fishes. They shot her the day his new father, Digger, came to pick him up.
"Burying that bear," I overheard Digger tell Mr. Oamaru once. "The first thing we ever did together as father and son."
Rangi's given us this global silent treatment ever since, a silence he extends to people, animals, ice.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There's something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat.
... This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles.

I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that.
At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“She was still loping around on all fours, her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. "Caramba!" She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature. The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in how to feel.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“On her last visit, the girl stole one of his family photographs right out of the frame. He thinks this means she is starting to care about him, too. Now whenever he looks at the empty frame, Sawtooth is moved to tears. He has to stare straight up at the ceiling, a loophole that prevents fluid from falling out of the eyes, thus saving a man the embarrassment of crying like a damn fool infant.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It's a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth's old eyes.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“It's unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. There's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices,
but because of the silence that is in it.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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

“Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I felt a throb of compassion. How can people live like they do? I wondered. Then I congragulated myself. This was a Stage 3 thought.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“I could have warned her. If we were back home, and Mirabella had come under attack by territorial beavers or snow-blind bears, I would have warned her. But the truth is that by Stage 3 I wanted her gone. Mirabella's inability to adapt was taking a visible toll. Her teeth were ground down to nubbins; her hair was falling out. ... her ribs were poking through her uniform. Her bright eyes had dulled to a sour whiskey color. But you couldn't show Mirabella the slightest kindness anymore-she'd never leave you alone!”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anything.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he needs the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn't forget her own face.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Increasingly, Sawtooth's own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl's hands, ...”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he's still whole.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“The Avalanche," peacemaker Rachel recites, "is very important. It's a privilege to sing it. It's a celebration of our past." Everybody around the table smiles at her.
"Yeah? Well, I've seen how easily the past can get rewritten." I glare at Mr. Oamaru. "Lyrics change. New authors come along.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves