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6fa3a09
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The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.
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Karen Russell |
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787a617
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My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
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Karen Russell |
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e7a9f57
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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a9788b8
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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...
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Karen Russell |
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93bee2c
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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4579ce8
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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Karen Russell |
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4bca41e
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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c78989f
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Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.
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Karen Russell |
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d833624
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When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
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karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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78d5ff5
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My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.
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Karen Russell (Author) |
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c64fff0
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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
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Karen Russell |
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bbaad64
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But if you kept thinking about a fight you'd lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
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Karen Russell |
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a3e1905
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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."
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Karen Russell |
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beea0ec
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She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year...
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Karen Russell |
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44b0831
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There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
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karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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77f3369
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If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
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Karen Russell |
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36ef24e
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I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he'd just hurt. I don't understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot.
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Karen Russell |
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9951a36
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Even in her trances, even while possessed, my sister was very shrewd about her prospects. A fantasy would collapse like a wave against the rocks of her intelligence. Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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Karen Russell |
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e254d74
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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a5ca9af
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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8aa22bc
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If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don't go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It's stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.
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out-to-sea
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Karen Russell |
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94b78de
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There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.
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monsters
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Karen Russell |
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f723835
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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.
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occurrence-00-422
karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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e72fabb
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THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!
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Karen Russell |
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22d670d
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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5047502
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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8637061
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Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night. I was acquainted with it, this bright spot, because once or twice before it had taken over during my fiercest wrestling matches. Encapsuled in this pinhead lived a brute, a swimmer, a thirst, a hunger, a fire-hater, a grass-jumper. The same as anybody's, probably, as any living per..
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Karen Russell |
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cb726e7
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Still, I'm not convinced that you were right, Dai--that it's such a bad thing, a useless enterprise to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn't know it at the time. But when I return to t..
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Karen Russell |
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d679c6d
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Blah!' Oglivy yells, pushing Emma and me into a pile of wet leaves. We roll around, a red flail of limbs and hysterical laughter. We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, under blossom smell of the forest. I breathe in the sharp odor of cold stars and skunk, thinking, 'This is the happiest I have ever been'. I wish somebody would murder a sheep every night of my life. It feels like we are all embarking on a nightma..
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Karen Russell |
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1351c64
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The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
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Karen Russell |
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7b94226
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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.
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Karen Russell |
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29acea6
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Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys...
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humor-relationships
short-stories
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Karen Russell |
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7467cfa
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But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I'm learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me.
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Karen Russell |
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b36f4aa
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Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.
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Karen Russell |
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5745864
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I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
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Karen Russell |
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e63d31f
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Beverly once read a science magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a phosphor that can permanently damage the eyes of the living. Necroluminescence - the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones.
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Karen Russell |
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7df696e
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Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens"."
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star-gazers-log
summer-time-crime
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Karen Russell |
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393c0fd
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Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this--France or the Bible.
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Karen Russell |
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d3afacc
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I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars.
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Karen Russell |
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ffcdbb9
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just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.
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Karen Russell |
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dd583ca
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It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.
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Karen Russell |
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6c36c38
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Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.
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Karen Russell |
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33c4bf1
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Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.
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Karen Russell |
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12f3a7f
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Rule One: Make friends with death Tailgating in the Antarctic is no joke. We are trying to do nothing less ambitious than reverse the course of history. We want Team Krill to defeat Team Whale. Look, if you want to tailgate in comfort, don't get on the boat. You can buy some quail eggs or snails or whatever you people eat and you can watch the Food Chain Games on your flat TV. Stay in Los Angeles. Hug your wife on your plush banquette. Chee..
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Karen Russell |