Karen Russell > Quotes

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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, Swamplandia!

“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, Swamplandia!

“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, Swamplandia!

“Blah!' Oglivy yells, pushing Emma and me into a pile of wet leaves. We roll around, a red flail of limbs and hysterical laughter. We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, under blossom smell of the forest. I breathe in the sharp odor of cold stars and skunk, thinking, 'This is the happiest I have ever been'. I wish somebody would murder a sheep every night of my life. It feels like we are all embarking on a nightmare together. 'And will stop it in progress!' I think, yanking Emma and Ogli to their feet and hurting towards the lake. We will make sure that the rest of the herd escapes Heimdall's fate, we will....”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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

“Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year...That's the way to do it, the grown up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”
― Karen Russell

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

“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, Swamplandia!

“On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu, like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings towards me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing's too big to avoid. That Leviathan fin, it shivers right through me. It's a light in my belly, cold and familiar. And I flash back to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can't remember which: 'There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction'.”
― 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

“The Beginning of the End can feel a whole lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
― Karen Russell

“Even in her trances, even while possessed, my sister was very shrewd about her prospects. A fantasy would collapse like a wave against the rocks of her intelligence. Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens".”
― 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

“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

“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

“It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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, Swamplandia!

“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, Swamplandia!

“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

“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

“I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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

“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

“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

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

“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, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There was a time when my mother would have said no, and reassured us with shock or laughter. These days, she leaves our hair unwashed and our questions unanswered. "How should I know, Maisy? What can I know? You go and ask your father. You go and tell your father," Ma said, her eyes glinting like nail heads, "what you are afraid of.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Even if Pops could have finagled a pass for me, I wouldn't have wanted to go. Adults Only was shorthand for boring, or scary, or some combination thereof. I'd heard the rumours, and I wasn't interested.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“She always accepted. Then the entire rink got that much wilder, that much whiter with snow. At first this confused me: this was what they were paying for? And then I got it. I saw it. What these men were purchasing was blindness: a snow cloak of invisibility. They could grab at the passing women without penalty, taunting them, tugging at their skirts. What the women wanted was less clear to me. To be grabbed at, I guess, without judgment.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Badger's mother was very, very sick. It looked like she caught a bad dream from somebody. She slumped in a motorized chair, heavy with sleep. If you saw her from a distance, she looked like an extension of the machine, a fleshy covering for the machine. Nobody on the island knew the specifics of her disease, but we could see its sly effects. It turned you into some nightmare centaur, a robot in a woman-blanket. Coughs, whirs, beeps, moans, but no movement. So-not that I condoned what Badger's father was doing during the Blizzard, but I could see why he'd pay to go snow-blind for a while.”
― 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

“Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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

“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

“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

“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

“My sisters all have Bible names that start with a pious growl, ... They eat unbuttered peas and fatty gristle and leave the choicest, glaziest cuts of the ham for Mr. Oamaru and me. They are pretty, and this means that charity comes easy to them. They don't understand the real cost of what they are asking of me.
There is a long silence, full of bright expectant stares ...”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he'd just hurt. I don't understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“We are flying to the Aokeora Glacier to sing down the snows. It's one of those rituals whose true meaning is lost in antiquity, a ritual that we continue because of blind tradition and our parents' desire to booze.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“When I was a much younger boy, my mother was beautiful, but it was a sewn-up tulip kind of beauty. Then my father left. We curled in and blackened. We were heathens, you know, before Mr. Oamaru and his piratical, body-soul conquest of my mother. Mr. Oamaru has had a soft opening effect. He paid her mortage and made my sisters. He made her beautiful again. Everyone notices. ...
And you know what? I hate him for it.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves