213 Quotes by Karen Russell

Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it’s just me at my most desperate.

Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost.

Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head.

You don’t want people to think you’re just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L’Engle.

Once you figure out what’s best for the story, take out the rest.

Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block.

When I’m drafting, I suppose it’s an intuitive process – figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character’s day-to-day reality.