Karen Russell Quotes:

Ocupation: Novelist

Life: b. July 10, 1981

Birthday: July 10

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

Topics: Ends, Middle, Feels

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

Topics: Kids, Secret

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.

source: - FaceBook post by Karen Russell from Aug 08, 2013

Topics: Wall, Party, Heart, Perimeter, Tugging

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

source: - "The Exchange: Karen Russell on 'Swamplandia!'". Interview with Rachel Hurn, www.newyorker.com. February 15, 2011.

Topics: Reality, Everyday, Fiction

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

Topics: Weather, Kingdoms, Kind, Older Sister, Summer Rain

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Topics: Dream, Special, Kind, Homelessness

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

Topics: Writing, Self, Perfection, Playfulness

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

Topics: Two, Would Be, Stories

Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.

Topics: Voice, People, House, Freaky

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

Topics: World, Students, Immersion

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

Topics: Florida, Swamps, Alligators, South Florida

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

Topics: Real, Mean, Thinking

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

Topics: Swim, Ponies, Desperate

I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.

Topics: Strong, Father, Thinking

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.

Topics: Stupid, Hate, People, Complainers

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

Topics: Crazy, Blood, Relation, Blood Relation

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.

Topics: Pain, Pockets, Body

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

Topics: Lonely, Alive, Fierce, Icarus

My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

Topics: Mom, Men, Use

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

Topics: New York, Writing, Stories

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes 'good' from 'bad' luck.

source: - "What Author Karen Russell Knows For Sure About 7 P.M." by Karen Russell, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 19, 2012.

Topics: Understanding, Luck, Events, Brevity, Shape Of Things

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Fiction

When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.

Topics: Reading, Shoes, Fans

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

Topics: Writing, Trying, Favorites Things

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

Topics: Feelings, Generations, Picnics, Truce, Suspension

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

Topics: Stuff, Horror, Sci Fi

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

Topics: Vocabulary, Class, Dumb

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

Topics: Territory, Grows, New Territory

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

Topics: Dream, Mean, Sleep, Sinkholes

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

Topics: Country, Might, Pay

I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

source: - "The Exchange: Karen Russell on 'Swamplandia!'". Interview with Rachel Hurn, www.newyorker.com. February 15, 2011.

Topics: Brother, Sibling, Understanding, Kent

Could we betray our parents by going back to them?

Topics: Parent, Betray

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

Topics: Book, White, Madness

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

Topics: Children, Writing, Thinking

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

Topics: Beautiful, Block, Names, Estuaries

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

Topics: Swim, Extinction, Certain, Prehistoric

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

source: - "Vampires in the Lemon Grove". Book by Karen Russell, February 12, 2013.

Topics: Stories, Realizing

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.

Topics: Summer, Rain, Sleep

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

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

Topics: Book, Writing, Symphony, Banjos

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

Topics: Space, Insightful, Stories

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.

Topics: Mother, Grief, Flower, Not Fair

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

Topics: Stories, Figures

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

Topics: Sister, Night, Age, Cypresses

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

source: - "Yao Ming: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. December 10, 2009.

Topics: Loss, Evil, Spinning

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

Topics: Regret, Pilgrimage

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

Topics: Girl, Way

Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.

Topics: Brother, Dad, War, Olivia, Radishes

I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

source: - "Karen Russell’s Fantastical World". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. February 7, 2013.

Topics: Dream, Thinking, Bird

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.

source: - FaceBook post by Karen Russell from Dec 02, 2012

Topics: Book, Reading, Light, Kiwi, Reading Room

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.

Topics: Lonely, Fall, Men, Suspension, Charcoal

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Reality, Past, Talking, Our Past, Fantasy And Reality

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Real, Encounters, Want

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Beautiful, Vocabulary, Helping

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: News, Diapers, Morbid

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Way, Myth, Valuable

Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Fall, Writing, Might

People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being. I remember reading some Adrienne Rich quote where she talks about how important it was just to watch bubbles rise in a glass.

source: - "Karen Russell’s Fantastical World". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. February 7, 2013.

Topics: Dream, Reading, Glasses, Myopic

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

source: - "Karen Russell’s Fantastical World". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. February 7, 2013.

Topics: Kids, Rays, Debt, Bradbury, Madeleines

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.

source: - FaceBook post by Karen Russell from Sep 01, 2014

Topics: Tragedy, Bats, Caves, Flooding

Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Fall, Book, Character

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Long, Red, Realist, Misrepresentation

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

Topics: Mom, Fighting, Thinking

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.

Topics: Kids, Animal, Self

If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.

source: - "Karen Russell’s Fantastical World". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. February 7, 2013.

Topics: One Thing, Ifs

When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Character, Reality, Drafting

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

source: - "Karen Russell’s Fantastical World". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. February 7, 2013.

Topics: Florida, Backyards, Madness, South Florida

Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Growing Up, Ocean, Imagination, Seamless

So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Book, Thinking, Decision, Fantasy Books

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line. It's a weird way to move forward. It's kind of like a way to caterpillar your way through these great woods. The best ones, whatever I feel like I'm writing about, some other secret thing will begin to come into focus.

source: - "Karen Russell’s Fantastical World". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. February 7, 2013.

Topics: Moving, Writing, Focus, Rough Drafts

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Mean, Attention, Fiction, Experimentation

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Motivation, Real, Dark

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Black, Hunters, Fiction, Lungs, Black Humor

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Eye, Thinking, Voice, Journalistic, Omniscience

It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Secret, Hidden Secrets

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Thinking, Views, People

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Training, Outsiders, Felt

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