Quote

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

Karen Russell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Entire
Inside
Accessible
Certain
Kingdoms
Kind
Sister
Weather
Seasons
Kinds
Older

More quotes by Karen Russell

Image
When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
Karen Russell
Image
Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.
Karen Russell
Image
I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
Karen Russell
Image
Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.
Karen Russell
Image
Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.
Karen Russell
Image
No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
Karen Russell
Image
So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.
Karen Russell
Image
I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.
Karen Russell
Image
I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.
Karen Russell
Image
America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
Karen Russell
Image
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
Karen Russell
Image
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.
Karen Russell
Image
Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.
Karen Russell
Image
Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
Karen Russell
Image
I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
Karen Russell
Image
If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
Karen Russell