Karen Russell - Swamplandia! (2011)

12 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Russell