213 Quotes by Karen Russell

Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.

The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him.

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.

I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he’d just hurt. I don’t understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot.

People are symptoms of dreams.

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

Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak.

That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet, because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the most perfunctory way, with none of the love I felt for my red Seth.

My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her.