213 Quotes by Karen Russell

I really try to write every day. It’s hard, but it’s my favorite thing to do, so it’s usually not too, too hard.

Somehow I wasn’t adding up right anymore. My parts weren’t summing into myself.

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ luck.

I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish that I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass.

It’s our suspicion that there’s another, better Heaven behind the cumulus screen,′ he murmurs into the grass, bending and tearing at a root that tastes beautifully yellow. ‘That’s the trouble. That’s what keeps us trapped here, minds in animals.

It’s funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.

You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.

Granana doesn’t understand what the big deal is. She didn’t cry at Olivia’s funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia’s name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors’ garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: “Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.

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.