Top 100 Karen Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it.”

— Karen Russell

52. “I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.”

— Karen Russell

53. “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

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

— Karen Russell

55. “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

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

— Karen Russell

57. “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

58. “I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death’s aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order? The.”

— Karen Russell

59. “People are symptoms of dreams.”

— Karen Russell

60. “Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak.”

— Karen Russell

61. “Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ luck.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

63. “Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost.”

— Karen Russell

64. “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

65. “I do think there’s something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.”

— Karen Russell

66. “I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories.”

— Karen Russell

67. “Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime – people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.”

— Karen Russell

68. “What bird are you calling?′ I ask, finally, when I can’t stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. ‘You.”

— Karen Russell

69. “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

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

— Karen Russell

71. “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.”

— Karen Russell

72. “When I’m drafting, I suppose it’s an intuitive process – figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character’s day-to-day reality.”

— Karen Russell

73. “Once you figure out what’s best for the story, take out the rest.”

— Karen Russell

74. “The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

76. “For me, the term “literary fiction” means there’s always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

78. “Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

80. “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.”

— Karen Russell

81. “In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: “Here’s a realistic accounting of the world in which we live.””

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

83. “The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him.”

— Karen Russell

84. “People really get myopic as they get older. We’re not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We’re not ever good at just being. I remember reading some Adrienne Rich quote where she talks about how important it was just to watch bubbles rise in a glass.”

— Karen Russell

85. “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

86. “This is it, the geographical limit of how far I’ll go for Ossie. We are learning longitude and latitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

88. “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.”

— Karen Russell

89. “Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?” – Kiwi, Swamplandia!”

— Karen Russell

90. “There are twenty-two stalls in the Barn. Eleven of the stabled horses are, as far as Rutherford can ascertain, former presidents of the United States of America. The other stalls are occupied by regular horses, who give the presidents suspicious, sidelong looks.”

— Karen Russell

91. “Sometimes, when you’re writing sentence by sentence, you’re not really sure what footprints you’re going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.”

— Karen Russell

92. “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.”

— Karen Russell

93. “March 1. DEAR BABY: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

97. “We clacked skeletons – to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.”

— Karen Russell

98. “Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.”

— Karen Russell

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

— Karen Russell

100. “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.”

— Karen Russell