Swamplandia! Quotes

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

“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!

“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!

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

“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!

“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!

“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!

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

“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!

“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!

“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!

“THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night. I was acquainted with it, this bright spot, because once or twice before it had taken over during my fiercest wrestling matches. Encapsuled in this pinhead lived a brute, a swimmer, a thirst, a hunger, a fire-hater, a grass-jumper. The same as anybody’s, probably, as any living person’s. I’m sure that yours and mine would push up for air with the same force:mass ratio. Would fin up, would open its frog mouth for air, would claw up, would gallop. This new self had all the personality of a muscle. Its haunches charged ahead of my heartbeat, leaving a wake of blood in my ears: KICK. KICK. KICK.”
― 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!

“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, Swamplandia!

“There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic--a "damn, fool math"--in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.

At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“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, Swamplandia!

“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!

“I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.”
― 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!

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

“Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“Our mother performed in starlight.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I’d fix on the Chief’s raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I’d suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the “black fruit” of love—a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit, she said, because she’d grown it for our mother, our father, Grandpa Sawtooth, even me and Kiwi. Loving a ghost was different, she explained—that kind of love was a bare branch. I pictured this branch curving inside my sister: something leafless and complete, elephantine, like a white tusk. No rot, she was saying, no fruit. You couldn’t lose a ghost to death.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

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

“That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet, because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the most perfunctory way, with none of the love I felt for my red Seth.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!