Quotes from Karen Russell

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.

But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him.

My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her.

Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long.

On her last visit, the girl stole one of his family photographs right out of the frame. He thinks this means she is starting to care about him, too. Now whenever he looks at the empty frame, Sawtooth is moved to tears. He has to stare straight up at the ceiling, a loophole that prevents fluid from falling out of the eyes, thus saving a man the embarrassment of crying like a damn fool infant.

Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It's a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth's old eyes.

The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around.

If they heard Death mounting the stairs at night, footsteps that the teenage Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at three a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast.

Promises are fragile things. You blink, and they turn into lies.

Doesn't it matter how you ask the question? Or if the tone of your request is closer to a fist than to an open palm? Can the nature of the request corrupt the purity of the gift, the donated sleep?

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

She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom.

But if it turns out that she really can adjust them from without? Reshuffle the deck of his past, leave a few cards out, sub in several from a sunnier suit, where was the harm in that? Harm had to be the opposite, didn't it? Letting the earliest truth metastasize into something that might kill you? The gangrenous spread of one day throughout the life span of a body— wasn't that something worth stopping?

It's unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. There's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.

The krill are in a rebuilding year. The krill are always in a rebuilding year. Every year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 krill gets eaten. Team Whale sucks Team Krill into the primordial combs of its baleen plates at twenty-eight knots. We've got a decent offense but we've got a pretty dismal record on defense. But this is going to be our season. With all your might, try to believe that.

Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices, but because of the silence that is in it.

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.

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

People are symptoms of dreams

Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.

i haf the sownd of more words butt i coud not remember the shaps of the letters.

I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could have vied with Jeanette for the number one spot, but I'd seen what happened if you gave in to your natural aptitudes. This wasn't like the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required to survive at the home.

Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I felt a throb of compassion. How can people live like they do? I wondered. Then I congragulated myself. This was a Stage 3 thought.

I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anything.