Fiction Quotes by Karen Russell

8 Fiction quotes by Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s prose twirls with surreal humor and vivid detail, turning ordinary moments into fantastical vignettes. These eight snippets provide a quick glimpse of her playful, inventive narrative voice.

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I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of…

Karen Russell

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America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully…

Karen Russell

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I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor.…

Karen Russell

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I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of…

Karen Russell

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

Karen Russell

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Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just…

Karen Russell

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And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that…

Karen Russell

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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…

Karen Russell

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“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…

Karen Russell

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“Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her head…

Karen Russell

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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.…

Karen Russell

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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Karen Russell

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“She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at…

Karen Russell

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“At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. (spoken…

Karen Russell

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“THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!”

Karen Russell

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“ Forever , just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.”

Karen Russell

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

Karen Russell

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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…

Karen Russell

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

Karen Russell

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“I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.”

Karen Russell

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“I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could have vied with Jeanette for…

Karen Russell

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“Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I…

Karen Russell

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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…

Karen Russell

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