Karen Russell famous quotes

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

#Ends #Middle #Feels

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Wall #Party #Heart

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Weather #Kingdoms #Kind

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

#Reading #Book #Names

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

#Dream #Special #Kind

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.
-- Karen Russell

#Writing #Self #Perfection

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Voice #People #House

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

#World #Students #Immersion

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

#Florida #Swamps #Alligators

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.
-- Karen Russell

#Real #Mean #Thinking

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Strong #Father #Thinking

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

#Lonely #Fall #Men

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

#Stupid #Hate #People

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

#Crazy #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.
-- Karen Russell

#Pain #Pockets #Body

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

#Lonely #Alive #Fierce

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Understanding #Luck #Events

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.
-- Karen Russell

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Writing #Trying #Favorites Things

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

#Feelings #Generations #Picnics

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

#Stuff #Horror #Sci Fi

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
-- Karen Russell

#Vocabulary #Class #Dumb

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

#Territory #Grows

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.
-- Karen Russell

#Dream #Mean #Sleep

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.
-- Karen Russell

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Brother #Sibling #Understanding

Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
-- Karen Russell

#Parent #Betray

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

#Book #White #Madness

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Beautiful #Block #Names

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
-- Karen Russell

#Swim #Extinction #Certain

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

#Stories #Realizing

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

#Kids #Animal #Self

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

#Summer #Rain #Sleep

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

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.
-- Karen Russell

#Book #Writing #Symphony

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

#Mom #Fighting #Thinking

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.
-- Karen Russell

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Mother #Grief #Flower

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

#Tragedy #Bats #Caves

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

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Sister #Night #Age

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.
-- Karen Russell

#Loss #Evil #Spinning

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

#Regret #Pilgrimage

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
-- Karen Russell

#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.
-- Karen Russell

#Brother #Dad #War