Quotes from Karen Russell

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.

It's our suspicion that there's another, better Heaven behind the cumulus screen,' he murmurs into the grass, bending and tearing at a root that tastes beautifully yellow. 'That's the trouble. That's what keeps us trapped here, minds in animals.

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.

Uncle Fitzy!" the girl yells. "Gingersnap is being bad!" Eisenhower hates it when she calls him Gingersnap. He complains about it with a statesman's pomp: "Gentlemen, there exists no more odious appellation than"--nose crumpling, black lips curling-- "Gingersnap." From The Barn at the End of Our Term

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.

I say nothing. But I keep thinking: It's been two years. What if all the Olivia-ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated, and rained down, and evaporated, and rained down. Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world. So that now there is only silt, and our stupid, salt-diluted longing. And nothing left of our sister to find.

There's something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat. ... This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles. I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.

We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can't quite grasp the punch line.

And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.

She was still loping around on all fours, her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. " Caramba! " She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing.

On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature. The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in how to feel.

But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.

Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

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.

The same spine that has been inside her since babyhood is hers today, the exact same bones from the womb, a thought that always fills her with a kind of thrilling claustrophobia. So much surface wrapped around that old stem. She watches her hands smear the water droplets on her stomach. It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

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

A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion -- from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.

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

People were mincing words for me now, making me a word puree. As if I didn't have the teeth to bite into the apple.

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.

the gravity of wound to fist

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.

What a weird future awaited her in the past!

I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage. In the cave I think she must have lent me some of it, because the strength I felt then was as huge as the sun. The yellow inside you that makes you want to live. I believe that she was the pulse and bloom that forced me toward the surface.