Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Thinking
Actually
Like
Dream
Together
Littles
Little
Unbroken
Feels
Birds
Something
Bird
Think
Attention

More quotes by Karen Russell

Image
Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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
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.
Karen Russell
Image
Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
Karen Russell
Image
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
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 want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
Karen Russell
Image
If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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
For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
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
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
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
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
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
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
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
Karen Russell
Image
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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