Karen Russell Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Russell