Quote

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

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
White
Persons
Whine
Person
Madness
Everything
Meant
Book
Understood
Open
Books
High

More quotes by 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
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 didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Karen Russell
Image
There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
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
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
Karen Russell
Image
When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.
Karen Russell
Image
Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.
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
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
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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
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
Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
Karen Russell
Image
Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.
Karen Russell
Image
It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
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
My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
Karen Russell
Image
My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
Karen Russell
Image
I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
Karen Russell