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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 63f802b | Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright. | Man | ||
| 2b89e0f | Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way. | Abraham Lincoln | ||
| 0da6d59 | Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she'd have to "take a rest" in the house, but she'd always emerge from these spells with a smile for us." | Karen Russell | ||
| 0c1b0eb | His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air. | Karen Russell | ||
| df0a025 | Even if she'd [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiance] the prognostications were grim--alligators with unusual pigmentation can't camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That's why you don't see albino Seths [Ava's pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man. | Karen Russell | ||
| 7dd86fc | Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:b lack, gray: black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry. | Karen Russell | ||
| 4d3d8d8 | For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore. | Karen Russell | ||
| ff9327d | What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water. | Karen Russell | ||
| b0f928c | I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision. | Karen Russell | ||
| bdae3b2 | When you are a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them. | Karen Russell | ||
| ff72712 | Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all"--who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness." | Karen Russell | ||
| fa9abf8 | The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life. | love | Karen Russell | |
| 7b0e61d | America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. | Karen Russell | ||
| 3e5b7bc | Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long. | Karen Russell | ||
| 63ef814 | You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it's a salad. | Karen Russell | ||
| d0a661a | Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails--and then right at his nadir, he'd agreed to an "avant" haircut performed by Cousin Steve." | Karen Russell | ||
| 7f93522 | As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her." | death loss sorrow | Karen Russell | |
| 45975a0 | But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues that I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hat.. | Karen Russell | ||
| d51d2ad | The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don't want to come all that way and miss the game. | Karen Russell | ||
| aa3b12d | At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. | Karen Russell | ||
| 7afc4a6 | He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstream of life, smiling and saying, "Pardon me," "After you,"and "No, thank you." | Karen Russell | ||
| 304d9ba | The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky. | karen-russell st-lucys-home | Karen Russell | |
| 4365cf1 | I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anything. | karen-russell st-lucys-home | Karen Russell | |
| ca58a5a | We don't have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety. | Karen Russell | ||
| a94a648 | Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ____.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space. | Karen Russell | ||
| 63ed83b | As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone. | Karen Russell | ||
| ed46487 | He looks me to pieces ... I realize now that I have been glimpsed and corner-of-the-eyed before, by the Chief and my sister and the yawning tourists. But I have never actually been looked at. Not like this. | karen-russell looking looks male-gaze seeing seeing-people staring | Karen Russell | |
| ff232d9 | That's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim. | Karen Russell | ||
| 66b6fb7 | Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn't just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what's done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water | Karen Russell | ||
| f2cff3f | Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. After | Karen Russell | ||
| a3f5516 | What a weird future awaited her in the past! | Karen Russell | ||
| efd3345 | I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death's aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order? The | Karen Russell | ||
| 801f802 | We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition. | epidemic | Karen Russell | |
| 98e7989 | In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn't forget her own face. | out-to-sea | Karen Russell | |
| 499a3fa | Increasingly, Sawtooth's own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl's hands, ... | out-to-sea | Karen Russell | |
| 11fbb3a | He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he's still whole. | out-to-sea | Karen Russell | |
| ddee65b | The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things. | out-to-sea | Karen Russell | |
| 62044cf | The Avalanche," peacemaker Rachel recites, "is . It's a privilege to sing it. It's a celebration of our past." Everybody around the table smiles at her. "Yeah? Well, I've seen how easily the past can get rewritten." I glare at Mr. Oamaru. "Lyrics change. New authors come along." | karen-russell occurrence-00-422 | Karen Russell | |
| 0d61f8e | Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror. | karen-russell occurrence-00-422 | Karen Russell | |
| 46ec339 | Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing. | Karen Russell | ||
| 9ccd46c | Her name in a stranger's mouth was a resurrection; however briefly, she was alive with him again again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb. | Karen Russell | ||
| fffde99 | She's dead. She's dead. | Karen Russell | ||
| c141244 | i haf the sownd of more words butt i coud not remember the shaps of the letters. | karen-russell | Karen Russell | |
| f3b65a1 | I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, ... But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, but a deeper terror. I don't want to be left alone. And I am ready to defend Ossie against whatever monster I encounter, ... and save her for myself. | karen-russell | Karen Russell |