Quotes from Karen Russell

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

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

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.

Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this--France or the Bible.

It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.

I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.

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

It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier- ... -and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment: when I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I'm flying, I'm rushing to meet my own reflection-

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.

What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.

Our mother performed in starlight.

She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year. Big Red curls up in a cold recess of the conch. That's the way to do it, the grown-up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.

Somethings you know right away to be final- when you lose your last baby tooth...Other times, you have to work out the milestone via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I'd just blown through my last-ever wednesday with Mom on the day after she died.

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

There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.

We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.

I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.

Could we betray our parents by going back to them?

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.

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

Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. "Help!" she screams to a sky full of crows. "He's not actually from Europe!

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

At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. (spoken by narrator Ava Bigtree in Swamplandia!)