Quotes from Karen Russell

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I'm sure I'd love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.

I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

Now I'll read anytime, anywhere. I love reading in front of the space heater. Isn't that a sad confession? But it's like my substitute for the roaring fireplace of yore.

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

I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars.

Forever , just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.

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.

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.

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.

Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens".

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.

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.

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

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.