213 Quotes by Karen Russell

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. “What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. “You.

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light…