Quotes from Karen Russell

We didn't talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness.

The sun is back at its original o'clock.

First love, first love," Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. "Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes." "Natural causes!" She was thinking that the poor girl had been garroted. Her bright-red hair racing the tail of the noose down her spine. You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.

Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she'd have to "take a rest" in the house, but she'd always emerge from these spells with a smile for us.

Each body, Beverly believes, has a secret language candled inside it, something inexpressible bright that can be transmitted truly only via touch.

My father has the "settler's scar," a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow.

I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.

We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.

The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls "the wink in the bureaucrats' wall": a glass window.

Necroluminescence--the light of the vanished. A hinnsight produced by the departed's body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones.

In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he needs the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn't forget her own face.

Increasingly, Sawtooth's own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl's hands, ...

I stare up at a busy construction pit. Tiny white spades are tossing huge quantities of darkness around. Stars—these are the stars.

He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he's still whole.

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it's a salad.

The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops.

Necroluminescence--the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed's body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones.

Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I've been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops.

Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails—and then right at his nadir, he'd agreed to an "avant" haircut performed by Cousin Steve.

His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air.

Even if she'd [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can't camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That's why you don't see albino Seths [Ava's pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man.

The nuns swept our hair back into high, bouffant hairstyles. This made us look more girlish and less inclined to eat people, the way that squirrels are saved from looking like rodents by their poofy tails.

At the Hoho's Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news.