Karen Russell Quotes

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

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

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

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

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

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

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.

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

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. 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.

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.

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

Could we betray our parents by going back to them?

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

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

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

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

So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

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

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

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.