Orange World and Other Stories Quotes

“Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one's death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“People were mincing words for me now, making me a word puree. As if I didn’t have the teeth to bite into the apple.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Sand, sand, sand—all that pulverized time. Eons ago, the world’s burst hourglass spilled its contents here; now the years pile and spin, waiting with inhuman patience to be swept into some future ocean.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime - people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“March 1. DEAR BABY: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion -- from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. "Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on a fabulous vacation.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“...a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“With aqueous indifference, the camera lifted its eye.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost. They burned that knowledge up like whale fat and continued to shine on.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Any human eye, goggled by a car’s windshield, can graft such fantasies onto the great Mojave.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Usually, you can only catch the Sasquatch blur of your own legendary moments in the side mirrors.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“People think of the green pastoral when they think of lovers in nature. Those English poets used the vales and streams to douse their lusts into verse. But the desert offers something that no forest brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors’ dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Nostalgia,” we are apt to label this phenomenon. It is the success of the invading plant, which seeks only to anchor itself in the past. Why move forward? Why move at all?”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Cillian fixed his uncle with a homicidal stare. Under the table, he touched his girlfriend’s foot with his foot; his eyebrows lifted in apology. His mother shot up with her steaming cauldron of beans, giving everyone another punitive lima ladle and removing the beer from the table.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“it had taken years before their affair was truly over. You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“They used our black pupils to polish up their antique triumphs.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“I stare up at a busy construction pit. Tiny white spades are tossing huge quantities of darkness around. Stars—these are the stars.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Sand, sand, sand—all that pulverized time. Eons ago, the world’s burst hourglass spilled its contents here; now the years pile and spin, waiting with inhuman patience to be swept into some future ocean. Sand washes right up to the paved road, washes over to the other side in a solid orange current, illuminated by their headlights.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World

“Unscathed, I wouldn’t say that,” the doctor said, frowning down at me with his expression of Ivy League constipation.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“You know, I have always hated that expression, “a blessing or a curse.” As if anything in life were so neatly divisible. Let’s try this: a freedom, or something worse.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Echoes of unknown origin. Words that went skipping across minds for centuries, apparently, before sinking into mine.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“Who doesn’t dream of it? The silence that blots up thought. The silence that frees one from the burden of being oneself.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“I have risen as far as this world will permit me to go,” the doctor told the empty cave. “To travel farther, must I also invert myself entirely?”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories

“This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.”
― Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories