Quotes from Karen Russell

Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.

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

but 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.

Una volta Beverly ha letto un articolo di una rivista scientifica sulla bioluminescenza, il bagliore naturale emesso da organismi come le lucciole e le meduse, ma sa che anche i morti emanano una strana luce, un fosforo che può danneggiare in modo permanente gli occhi dei vivi. Necroluminescenza – la luce degli scomparsi. Un pensiero retrospettivo prodotto dal corpo del defunto. I tuoi fallimenti retroilluminati dalla morte dei tuoi cari.

For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore.

How could you make a mistake when you had one option?

Sand, sand, sand—all that pulverized time. Eons ago, the world's burst hourglass spilled its contents here; now the years pile and spin, waiting with inhuman patience to be swept into some future ocean.

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.

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.

Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot.

You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.

The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life.

Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn't just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what's done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water

We met every morning, still bearded with toast crumbs from our continental breakfasts.

He tried to scrub children's vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius.

I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.

I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.

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

Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?" -- Kiwi, Swamplandia!

We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest.

I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.

Who is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue?" -- The Chief, Swamplandia

How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it.

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