Top 100 Karen Russell Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Karen Russell

2. “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.”

— Karen Russell

3. “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

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

— Karen Russell

5. “There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.”

— Karen Russell

6. “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

7. “You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

9. “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

10. “I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

13. “The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.”

— Karen Russell

14. “In short stories there’s more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it’s almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.”

— Karen Russell

15. “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

16. “Beverly once read a science magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a phosphor that can permanently damage the eyes of the living. Necroluminescence – the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones.”

— Karen Russell

17. “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

18. “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish that I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass.”

— Karen Russell

19. “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

20. “Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

22. “If you’re gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.”

— Karen Russell

23. “It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations – it’s a crazy, wild gift.”

— Karen Russell

24. “Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.”

— Karen Russell

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

28. “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.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

30. “Somehow I wasn’t adding up right anymore. My parts weren’t summing into myself.”

— Karen Russell

31. “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

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

— Karen Russell

33. “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.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

35. “The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. “Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on a fabulous vacation.”

— Karen Russell

36. “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.”

— Karen Russell

37. “I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.”

— Karen Russell

38. “Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can’t quantify.”

— Karen Russell

39. “Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.”

— Karen Russell

40. “I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.”

— Karen Russell

41. “My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.”

— Karen Russell

42. “Often I wonder to what extent a mortal’s love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I’ll never quite understand. And lately I’ve been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does.”

— Karen Russell

43. “It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.”

— Karen Russell

44. “It’s funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.”

— Karen Russell

45. “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

46. “You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.”

— Karen Russell

47. “When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the ‘shoe closet.’ Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.”

— Karen Russell

48. “The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life.”

— Karen Russell

49. “Could we betray our parents by going back to them?”

— Karen Russell

50. “Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block.”

— Karen Russell