213 Quotes by Karen Russell

Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It’s not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother’s old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime – people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.

The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. “Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on a fabulous vacation.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses.

What bird are you calling?′ I ask, finally, when I can’t stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. ‘You.

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.

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

I’m probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny’s waitress with smoker’s-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

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. And lately I’ve been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does.