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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| acaab88 | I just want to tell her that I'm sorry," Wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice. And it's clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be." | karen-russell | Karen Russell | |
| 15cba98 | Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She's alone with Annie. | karen-russell sleep-away-camp | Karen Russell | |
| d44e820 | The better part of one's life consists of his friendships. | Abraham Lincoln | ||
| 2b3e026 | Touch me again, Bird Man, I thought urgently. Tell a joke, say anything -- because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, "convection" {n}, in his Field Notes: the rapid cooling of a body in the absence of all tourists. Even Kiwi, King of Stage Fright, admitted to feeling it on Sunday nights. Convection caused your thoughts to develop an alarming blue tinge and required .. | Karen Russell | ||
| f3b2861 | This new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it. | Karen Russell | ||
| 55a1788 | Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed - indefinitely! | star-gazers-log summer-time-crime | Karen Russell | |
| 8f79d22 | The baby turtles are turning away from the ocean. It's easy to see why. The black waves lap up the moonbeams, and the starlight on the inky surface of the water gives off such a pale glow when you compare it to the megawatt flashlights that Raffy is swirling in hypnotic circles. | star-gazers-log summer-time-crime | Karen Russell | |
| b6417bf | Heaven would be a comfy armchair....You'd get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life's melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy--the a cappella version--or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussion cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and l.. | Karen Russell | ||
| 59b8cec | 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 westward-migration | Karen Russell | |
| 537b484 | Grammar can erect a false wall. Look at how I keep falling into this trap, writing this piece. To refer to the thousands of diverse individuals with unique histories who are sleeping on the street tonight as "the homeless" certainly expedites a sentence. But it inadvertently reinforces an ugly and false idea, perhaps secretly consoling: that "the homeless" are a monolithic population, a different species of person from those of "us" lucky e.. | Karen Russell | ||
| 2b39a3c | I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech. | Karen Russell | ||
| de35cb4 | when you're raising weather by artificial means, it's hard to pretend you don't have a hand in the change | Karen Russell | ||
| 060a4e5 | People talk about heredity as if it's linear and vertical. Dead people pass things "down" to the young." | Karen Russell | ||
| 5af1723 | People with options feel torn. People with options feel pulled, tugged - people who can move in multiple directions. Whereas those without homes are often immobilized by illness and poverty and addition. They lack stable shelter, a bed in which to dream. Without this most basic infrastructure, how does a person so much as imagine alternatives, let alone move toward them, inhabit them? Feeling 'torn' is yet another luxury of the highly mobil.. | Karen Russell | ||
| 50bd50b | If they heard Death mounting the stairs at night, footsteps that the teenage Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at three a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast. | Karen Russell | ||
| d48a595 | At the Hoho's Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news. | Karen Russell | ||
| 1c20639 | I say nothing. But I keep thinking: It's been two years. What if all the Olivia-ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated, and rained down, and evaporated, and rained down. Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world. So that now there is only silt, and our stupid, salt-diluted longing. And nothing left of our sister to find. | Karen Russell | ||
| d0cc1e9 | Maybe that rusty boat hangar looked like the entrance to a cave to her," he'd said. Maybe. If you were eight, and near-sighted, and nostalgic for places that you'd never been. But if the Glowworm Grotto actually exists, that changes everything. Olivia's ghost could be there now, twitching her nose with rabbity indignation - "But I left you a map!" Wondering what took us so long to find her." | Karen Russell | ||
| 01a0612 | My dad's version of the book, the staid, declarative Guide to the Galaxy, is nearly identical, except that the graphics are a matte black, and the same information is listed as Fact #47. I guess that's what growing up means, at least according to to the publishing industry: phosphorescence fades to black and white, and facts cease to be fun. | Karen Russell | ||
| d7ba4d3 | Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots. | Karen Russell | ||
| 711be2b | It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. | Karen Russell | ||
| 2fd715b | Musician Russell Javors was worried to hear of the unenthusiastic response from Richard and A&M. "Poor Karen," he says. "She was an artist, and she was just trying to work and to explore her craft, and she had every right as an artist to do that. Collaboration is only as good as the sum of its parts, and you have to let each one of those pieces explore what it is that they do. There have to be equal parts. Nobody can be controlling. Karen w.. | Randy L. Schmidt | ||
| 7dde3a3 | How could you make a mistake when you had one option? | Karen Russell | ||
| 02303a1 | Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. | Abraham Lincoln | ||
| 5b7cece | Go where glory waits thee,Oh! still remember me! | Thomas Moore | ||
| 94058ce | Rutherford arches his neck toward her outstretched hand. Freckles of light float across his patchy hindquarters. He licks the girl's palm according to a code that he's worked out: - - - -, which means that he is Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States of America, and that she should alert the local officials. "Ha-ha!" the girl laughs. "That tickles." | Karen Russell | ||
| 38ae6ce | The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl's schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him. | Karen Russell | ||
| 237e50f | 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. | Karen Russell | ||
| e11d3b0 | a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen | Karen Russell | ||
| d5795ec | Turn the lights of please, Ava," she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult's breath turned the world as small and dark as a boat hold." | Karen Russell | ||
| c55e700 | I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none. | Karen Russell | ||
| 1f7989a | We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest. | Karen Russell | ||
| 681e95d | It occurred to me that, given the life span of a moth, one kid's twitch must take a year to complete. | Karen Russell | ||
| 9dc0428 | We didn't talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. | Karen Russell | ||
| 2ecabba | First love, first love," Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. "Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes." "Natural causes!" She was thinking that the poor girl had been garroted. Her bright-red hair racing the tail of the noose down her spine. You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you." | Karen Russell | ||
| 0faab68 | My father has the "settler's scar," a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow." | Karen Russell | ||
| 8f35ad8 | The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls "the wink in the bureaucrats' wall": a glass window." | Karen Russell | ||
| f8272dd | My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her. | Karen Russell | ||
| bea2536 | The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops. | Karen Russell | ||
| 35a364d | Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I've been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops. | Karen Russell | ||
| d00de56 | Often I wonder to what extent a mortal's love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I'll never quite understand. And lately I've been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does. | Karen Russell | ||
| 6f2483c | Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an "imperial vocation." | Karen Russell | ||
| 25093d7 | This idea appealed to me--I was a quiet kid myself, branded "mean," and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)" | Karen Russell | ||
| b266836 | We amassed a plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the oak that included the Sounds of Warfare Blazer, a toy gun that required sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a tubercular guinea pig. Those | Karen Russell |