Quotes from Karen Russell

The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.

Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots.

This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded "mean," and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)

We amassed a plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the oak that included the Sounds of Warfare Blazer, a toy gun that required sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a tubercular guinea pig. Those

That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself.

Cillian fixed his uncle with a homicidal stare. Under the table, he touched his girlfriend's foot with his foot; his eyebrows lifted in apology. His mother shot up with her steaming cauldron of beans, giving everyone another punitive lima ladle and removing the beer from the table.

What a shame, I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

I just want to tell her that I'm sorry," Wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice. And it's clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be.

It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.

Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this—France or the Bible.

Overhead, the clouds stretch across the sky like some monstrous spiderweb, dewed with stars. Tiny planes from the Mainland whir towards the yellow moon, only to become cobwebbed by cloud.

Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She's alone with Annie.

You know, I have always hated that expression, "a blessing or a curse." As if anything in life were so neatly divisible. Let's try this: a freedom, or something worse.

We don't have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety.

What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water.

Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ____.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.

eschatological manipulation

I blinked down at a little blond child and then saw that my two hands were shaking violently, soundlessly, like old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles.

Rutherford arches his neck toward her outstretched hand. Freckles of light float across his patchy hindquarters. He licks the girl's palm according to a code that he's worked out: - - - -, which means that he is Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States of America, and that she should alert the local officials. "Ha-ha!" the girl laughs. "That tickles.

They greyhound whine with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrew-mice, or to piss a joyful stream onto the topiaries. But generally, if her mistress was crying, so was the puppy.

This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.

Just about everybody I've ever wanted to impress, I've now outlived.

As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.

I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.