Quotes from Karen Russell

They used our black pupils to polish up their antique triumphs.

As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.

With aqueous indifference, the camera lifted its eye.

Perhaps the knowledge of one's death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost. They burned that knowledge up like whale fat and continued to shine on.

The Avalanche," peacemaker Rachel recites, "is very important . It's a privilege to sing it. It's a celebration of our past." Everybody around the table smiles at her. "Yeah? Well, I've seen how easily the past can get rewritten." I glare at Mr. Oamaru. "Lyrics change. New authors come along.

She came for him like an astronaut, bouncing on the gray carpet. The only English word she knew was his name. Almost weightlessly, she reached for him. For wasn't she equally terrified? There was no buoy other than this boy, who had gripped her with his thin, freckled arms, bellying her out of the peat bog and into time.

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.

Any human eye, goggled by a car's windshield, can graft such fantasies onto the great Mojave.

The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don't want to come all that way and miss the game.

Maybe that rusty boat hangar looked like the entrance to a cave to her," he'd said. Maybe. If you were eight, and near-sighted, and nostalgic for places that you'd never been. But if the Glowworm Grotto actually exists, that changes everything. Olivia's ghost could be there now, twitching her nose with rabbity indignation - "But I left you a map!" Wondering what took us so long to find her.

Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.

when you're raising weather by artificial means, it's hard to pretend you don't have a hand in the change

My dad's version of the book, the staid, declarative Guide to the Galaxy, is nearly identical, except that the graphics are a matte black, and the same information is listed as Fact #47. I guess that's what growing up means, at least according to to the publishing industry: phosphorescence fades to black and white, and facts cease to be fun.

Unscathed, I wouldn't say that," the doctor said, frowning down at me with his expression of Ivy League constipation.

People talk about heredity as if it's linear and vertical. Dead people pass things "down" to the young.

Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.

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

Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an "imperial vocation.

Her name in a stranger's mouth was a resurrection; however briefly, she was alive with him again again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb.

She's dead. She's dead.

He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstream of life, smiling and saying, "Pardon me," "After you,"and "No, thank you.

Time, as our species has lived it on this planet, will cease to exist. No more dark/light binary. No more active red daytime, blue evening dissolving. No longer is sunshine the coagulant of consciousness, causing us to clot into personalities, to cohere once more on our pillows each morning.

I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, ... But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, but a deeper terror. I don't want to be left alone. And I am ready to defend Ossie against whatever monster I encounter, ... and save her for myself.

I have risen as far as this world will permit me to go," the doctor told the empty cave. "To travel farther, must I also invert myself entirely?