Quotes from Karen Russell

People think of the green pastoral when they think of lovers in nature. Those English poets used the vales and streams to douse their lusts into verse. But the desert offers something that no forest brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors' dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space.

My oldest daughter was four pounds at birth, and her appearance flooded the earth with an infinite number of horrors and perils, a demonic surge of catastrophic possibilities out of all proportion to the tiny mass in my arms. Love unlids Pandora's box.

Live long enough, and your life becomes your own to gamble with again

An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends.

When you are a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

He looks me to pieces … I realize now that I have been glimpsed and corner-of-the-eyed before, by the Chief and my sister and the yawning tourists. But I have never actually been looked at. Not like this.

Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night.

The boy could scarcely believe the size of the boulders, clustered under the enormous sun like dead red rockets awaiting repair, or the span of the sky, a cheerfully vacant blue dome, the desert's hallucinatory choreography achieved through stillness, brightness, darkness, distance -- and all of this before noon.

I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, or love. Some days, I know, I'm one of them. You find that you're not a match with the donor. Or you sense that the gift will take some freedom from you. Your body rebels, maybe you don't even know why. But the donation is rejected.

Kids were for later, maybe. They could still see the children they had been.

But the desert offers something that no forest, brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors' dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space.

Back then we played actual games. We hid and we sought.

Secret deals get brokered behind the Barn, just north of the red sloop of the bunny hutch. A number of the presidents are planning their escape for a day they are calling the Fourth of July.

Now her body was the only place where the memories were preserved.

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all"—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness.

a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen

This new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it.

Heartbreak is the university diagnosis for the pain that accompanies the end of love. But this was an unusual breakup, in that Cillian's mind shattered first.

And then she grinned. Magreb was the first and only other vampire I'd ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.

You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.

That's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.

Echoes of unknown origin. Words that went skipping across minds for centuries, apparently, before sinking into mine.

their eyes flicking all over each other.

Who doesn't dream of it? The silence that blots up thought. The silence that frees one from the burden of being oneself.