73+ Karen Russell Quotes On Education, Work And Empire

Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her debut novel Swamplandia!, which was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her other works include the short story collections St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Karen Russell on love, life, education.

Top 10 Karen Russell Quotes

1. Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.
2. I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.
3. My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
4. It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
5. 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.
6. There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
7. A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
8. I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.
9. I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
10. It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

Karen Russell Short Quotes

• If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
• My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
• You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
• I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.
• Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
• You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.
• I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.
• My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
• The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
• Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

Karen Russell Quotes About Love

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

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

"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. — Karen Russell

Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for. — Karen Russell

Karen Russell Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being. I remember reading some Adrienne Rich quote where she talks about how important it was just to watch bubbles rise in a glass. — Karen Russell

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

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

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

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift. — Karen Russell

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

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

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light. — Karen Russell

My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly. — Karen Russell

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature. — Karen Russell

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

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space. — Karen Russell

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

I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are. — Karen Russell

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

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes. — Karen Russell

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. “What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. “You. — 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. — Karen Russell

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

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again. — Karen Russell

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

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

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

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. — Karen Russell

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

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

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

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers. — Karen Russell

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. — Karen Russell

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed? — Karen Russell

Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself. — Karen Russell

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live." — Karen Russell

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication. — Karen Russell

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

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful. — Karen Russell

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials. — Karen Russell

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. — Karen Russell

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify. — Karen Russell

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. — Karen Russell

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest. — Karen Russell

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

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses. — Karen Russell

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

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell. — Karen Russell

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures. — Karen Russell

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Karen Russell

1. Karen Russell's work demonstrates the importance of taking risks and pushing boundaries in order to create something unique and meaningful.
2. Her writing also emphasizes the power of imagination and how it can be used to explore complex issues and emotions.
3. Finally, her work serves as a reminder that stories can be used to connect with readers on a deeper level and create a lasting impact.