The Antidote Quotes

“Why should money make evil comprehensible to anyone? But it does precisely this. Greed, violence, cruelty-money can explain them. Money can make the most heinous act seem like a sane one. A business decision. A necessary calculation. Evil’s genius is to costume itself as sense.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Ask any stone or flower if it feels grateful to be here. Your mother does not have much advice to pass on, but I can tell you when to be wary. You should be grateful is a sentence that the powerful wield like a cudgel.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Fear is a ghost. It grows in proportion to what we all know and never say. It swells on what we do and do not admit to our own awareness. I will offer up my own life as proof, because I am every day afraid. Take my ghosts from me.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Cored cottonwood trees told a millennial story written in wavy circles that no politician had cared to read. Congressmen train themselves to think in election cycles, not planetary ones. They see spiking market highs and lows, and forget how to read in circles. Uz”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“In the center of the storm, I believed that the worst had happened. But I was wrong about that. The dust had another lesson to teach me: so long as you’re still drawing breath, there’s always more to lose.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Q: What is the evil this world runs on? A: Better you than me.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“You might go on thinking that we cats are supporting characters in your human dramas, instead of souls in four-legged bodies with our own compelling destinies. Pet is a word I have always detested. Anyone who truly loves a cat must admit that it is a love between equals- it does not fall from a great height like rain, or pity.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“What I wanted to say was that I’d soared as the crow flies inside my father’s memory, and I’d seen more than he was able to see: the plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Names are the spells of protection mothers cast on their children,”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“can see this ain’t what you pictured. You tell me what’s missing. What would it take to make this place feel like home?” “My bones in the ground,” I told him. “And even then, I’d just be visiting.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Freak luck, Ant. The way a bone will sometimes set crooked. That’s what made you a witch.” Cherry takes a mechanical view of what happened inside us. We survived a blast that opened a door. In most people, the door becomes a wall again. Time heals it. Time seals it shut. For us, there is no more door. There is a permanent opening—a vacancy. Space for rent.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“We swayed like that for whole minutes, the storm intensifying and ebbing off. After such a long wait, the rain felt like a violent gift.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“I realized I was holding my camera in the exact same way that the witch held her earhorn and the girl held her filthy ball, using it to anchor me to my purpose, and I smiled.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“The rain was falling down, down, down. Water returning to us from the sky is always moving lifeward. Rootward. Leafward. Thirsty earth welcomed the water home, bringing the rainfall down to the roots.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“The story we taught our kids and dramatized with silly hats during the Founder’s Day pageant—that story was killing everything. There were cavities in Uz’s story that needed to be filled in, before a more permanent collapse occurred. We had to look at the real origins of this blowing soil, this degraded land.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Run for your life, said a deep voice inside me. It sounded so much older than I was. Older than humans, the voice from under the stones. Perhaps the angels were counseling me also, but I could not hear them over the tornado. I obeyed. I ran. To be pursued by a cloud is a terrifying experience, like trying to outrun a forest fire, a predator that could not see or hear or smell me, that would consume me without realizing it. Hunger without a body to contain it. Hunger nourishing itself with anything in its path, trees and dams and sheds and silos and entire barns.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“If you do not have the power to say no, your yes is meaningless.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Torture takes every desire from you until the best thing you can imagine is the cessation of pain.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“What can two people do against church and state, Ania?” “We can find two more people. Two more after that…”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Eventually my horror rusted over. I did nothing, and soon it was covered by the grasses of my new home.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“It is very possible to live in a house built from stolen timber without thinking of oneself as a thief. For years, I did this.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“The more we learned, the less I wished to understand who we were in this story.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Well, how could I help anyone, when I did not have anything? I first needed power myself, I reasoned. Once I had my own land and money, then I would be able to help others.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“The Pawnee are the people of the Central Plains, whose vast country reaches from the Niobrara to south of the Arkansas River, covering two-thirds of what appeared on our map as Nebraska and a great portion of Kansas. In my mother’s lifetime, all that land had belonged to them. I applied to claim one hundred and sixty acres of it. We knew whose land we were taking, but where else could we go? What choice did we have? Ania and I saw clearly then that the Indians who lived beside us had been made into prisoners on their homeland. What had happened to the Poles in Germany was happening here, and no settler lifted a hand to stop it. Quite the opposite. Many settlers spoke openly in support of forcing the Pawnees to leave Nebraska. “They got some of the best land, and it’s wasted on them!” complained the innkeeper. The U.S. soldiers did nothing to protect the Pawnees or their lands but instead let the White settlers do whatever they pleased on the reservation.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Now the great herds are ghosts.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Ania gave Andrew Dawson her family Bible at our last stop, and I called her a fool—“Do you imagine that Mr. Dawson is Catholic? Do you think that he reads Polish?” She laughed angrily and told me, “What else do I have to give, Tomasz? That man saved my life.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“I was born a serf in all but name, my language outlawed and my religion persecuted. My skin is the color of an unwashed onion. In America, this placed me ahead of many. On a low rung of the ladder, but higher than the Black porter. I felt that new height in my body, the distance to the ground. I heard the ticking pulse of a sick relief: not me not me not me, Andrew Dawson—better you than me.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“I hadn’t known—no one had ever told me—that I was a soldier in a war. We newcomers to the Great Plains were invited out here by the U.S. government to hold ground. The Homestead Act, the Dawes Act, all part of a battle plan. Over time, light-skinned children would grow old in this West with no memory of an earlier home, no awareness that they were the daughters and the sons of an invading army—second- and third- and fourth- and fifth-generation Americans. Putting Native lands into White hands. Putting forests and plains into production. Turning soil into cash.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“Monsters costume themselves in human skin and walk around telling their charming stories, and believing them. Many never learn to see the truth of who they are, the teeth inside their smiles.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote

“It was a lucky story, luck I did nothing to deserve, and I did not want to cause anyone pain by sharing it. My baby’s conception happened on a rooftop sometime in late summer while I rode the moaning boy beneath me in the trance of my pleasure. I wanted my baby and I loved his father. Happiness threatens people, no different than horror.”
― Karen Russell, The Antidote