213 Quotes by Karen Russell

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

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

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.