St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Quotes

“My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, “I wanna go home! I wanna go home!” Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.”
― Karen Russell (Author), St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories

“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.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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. Your grandmother ate pigeons.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu, like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings towards me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing's too big to avoid. That Leviathan fin, it shivers right through me. It's a light in my belly, cold and familiar. And I flash back to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can't remember which: 'There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction'.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens".”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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 nightmare together. 'And will stop it in progress!' I think, yanking Emma and Ogli to their feet and hurting towards the lake. We will make sure that the rest of the herd escapes Heimdall's fate, we will....”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“We sang at the chapel annexed to the home every morning. We understood that this was the humans' moon, the place for howling beyond purpose. Not for mating, not for hunting, not for fighting, not for anything but the sound itself. And we'd howl along with the choir, hurling every pitted thing within us at the stained glass.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier- ... -and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment: when I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I'm flying, I'm rushing to meet my own reflection-”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage. 'King me,' I growled, out of turn. 'I say king me!' and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique, fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you've never seen.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“What bird are you calling?' I ask, finally, when I can't stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. 'You.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“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. Big Red curls up in a cold recess of the conch. That’s the way to do it, the grown-up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Could we betray our parents by going back to them?”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can't quite grasp the punch line.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There's something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat.
... This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles.

I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that.
At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“She was still loping around on all fours, her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. "Caramba!" She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature. The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in how to feel.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves