Karen Joy Fowler Quotes & Sayings

I felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked, and struck each other a hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on the surface of my skin. — Karen Joy Fowler

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me. — Karen Joy Fowler

I'm red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes. — Karen Joy Fowler

Do onto others as you would have others do unto you'" is our highest, most developed morality", Dr. Sosa said. "And really the only one necessary; all the others flow from that; you don't need Ten Commandments. But if you do believe, as I do, that morality starts with God, then you have to wonder why He simultanelously hardwired us against it. — Karen Joy Fowler

Dean coughed helpfully. Somewhere in the cough was the word "persuasion." He was throwing Mo a lifeline.
Mo preferred to go down. "I haven't actually read any Austen. I'm more into mysteries, crime fiction, courtroom stuff." This was disappointing, but not damning. On the other hand it was a failing; on the other, manfully owned up to. If only Mo had stopped there.
"I don't read much women's stuff. I like a good plot," he said.
Prudie finished her drink and set her glass down so hard you could hear it hit. "Austen can plot like a son of a bitch," she said. "Bernadette, I believe you were telling us about your first husband."
"I could start with my second. Or the one after that," Bernadette offered. Down with plot! Down with Mo! — Karen Joy Fowler

I want a normal girlfriend. Someone restful. You know anyone like that?"
"I'd volunteer if you were rich," I told him. "Like hugely rich. I could be restful for massive sums of money."
"Flattered. But no. — Karen Joy Fowler

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action. — Karen Joy Fowler

The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch — Karen Joy Fowler

There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science — Karen Joy Fowler

My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone. — Karen Joy Fowler

Poor Elinor! Willoughby on one side, Brandon on the other. She is quite entre deux feux. Prudie had a bit of lipstick on her teeth, or else it was wine. Jocelyn wanted to lean across and wipe it off with a napkin, the way she did when Sahara needed tidying. But she restrained herself; Prudie didn't belong to her. The fire sculpted Prudie's face, left the hollows of her cheeks hollow, brightened her deep-set eyes. She wasn't pretty like Allegra, but she was attractive in an interesting way. She drew your eye. She would probably age well, like Angelica Houston. If only she would stop speaking French. Or go to France, where it would be less noticeable. — Karen Joy Fowler

I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through. — Karen Joy Fowler

Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section. — Karen Joy Fowler

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn't know this, or else he was ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning. He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more.
We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized. It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning. — Karen Joy Fowler

Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen? — Karen Joy Fowler

You know how everything seems so normal when you're growing up," she asked plaintively, "and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts? — Karen Joy Fowler

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone — Karen Joy Fowler

At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself. — Karen Joy Fowler

If we see a sad rain, it doesn't mean the rain is sad, but it means we see it. That's an easily dismissible kind of projection. But what I'm struggling to say, is that we take that rain in through our own hearts and emotions and senses and skin, and all those filters have an impact. — Karen Joy Fowler

I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem. — Karen Joy Fowler

So the studies don't back me up. There'll always be more studies. We'll change our minds and I'll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong. — Karen Joy Fowler

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me. — Karen Joy Fowler

In Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees — Karen Joy Fowler

I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin? — Karen Joy Fowler

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through. — Karen Joy Fowler

There's no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do. — Karen Joy Fowler

She used to grip me so tightly that the only way I could put her down was to pry her loose, one digit at a time. For two years, I had bruises from her fingers and toes all over my body. — Karen Joy Fowler

I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don't mean to complain about that. — Karen Joy Fowler

Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface. — Karen Joy Fowler

My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face. — Karen Joy Fowler

The monkey girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum? — Karen Joy Fowler

It was long past time to change the subject. "The boy playing the bagpipes is really good," Prudie said.
If only she'd said it in French! Trey made a delighted noise. "Nessa Trussler. A girl. Or something."
Prudie looked at Nessa again. There was, she could see now, a certain plump ambiguity. Maybe Trey wouldn't tell anyone what she'd said. Maybe Nessa was perfectly comfortable with who she was. Maybe she was admired throughout the school for her musical ability. Maybe pigs could jig. — Karen Joy Fowler

IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don't see it, but it's obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It's hard to always come in second. — Karen Joy Fowler

I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. — Karen Joy Fowler

I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them. Freak or fake, I'd been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both. — Karen Joy Fowler

Each of us has a private Austen. — Karen Joy Fowler

I have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader. — Karen Joy Fowler

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true,
only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture. — Karen Joy Fowler

Like they say, you never know a person till you've done time with them. — Karen Joy Fowler

But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail. — Karen Joy Fowler

We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus points for those who get all the way to insects. — Karen Joy Fowler

I learned how to comport myself among trolls, elves, hobbits or goblins. I learned that a friend can be lost to greed and avarice. I learned that solving riddles may be as important a survival skill as bowmanship. I know how to talk to a dragon, and that it's best not to. — Karen Joy Fowler

But the most fantastical of my imaginary worlds turned out to be the one I'd thought was real. As a child, I believed the world was run by competent, sane and benevolent adults. I believed this for much longer than I believed in Santa Claus.
That belief has since gone down like the Titanic (on which I also spent a lot of time as a child). The world is run by nitwits and psychopaths. — Karen Joy Fowler

One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn't see them, or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking. — Karen Joy Fowler

Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act. — Karen Joy Fowler

The secret to a good life," he told me once, "is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you're doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence. — Karen Joy Fowler

I wasn't happy, exactly, but I was remembering how happiness felt. — Karen Joy Fowler

I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out — Karen Joy Fowler

All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link. — Karen Joy Fowler

In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery. — Karen Joy Fowler

It was one of those subjects to which everything that slithers across your brain seems relevant. I find this to be true of most topics. — Karen Joy Fowler

The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind. — Karen Joy Fowler

At five of five, I called the airline number - 800-FUCK-YOU - and was told I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered in Sacramento, though my call was important to them. — Karen Joy Fowler

Solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside — Karen Joy Fowler

Life is all arrivals and departures. — Karen Joy Fowler

You've done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings?"
"Oh my Lord, yes." Bernadette's hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. "I guess I would. I've had about a hundred of them. — Karen Joy Fowler

When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk. — Karen Joy Fowler

It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her. — Karen Joy Fowler

Airports and train stations are where you get to cry — Karen Joy Fowler

Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I'm not. — Karen Joy Fowler

Where you succeed will never so much matter as where you fail.
-We Are All Beside Ourselves — Karen Joy Fowler

How was your day, Rosie?" Dad would ask when he came home from work and I'd tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. "That's good to hear," he'd say. — Karen Joy Fowler

I couldn't fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back. — Karen Joy Fowler

I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either. — Karen Joy Fowler

The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't — Karen Joy Fowler

I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all. — Karen Joy Fowler

You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it's a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism - all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it. — Karen Joy Fowler

But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things. — Karen Joy Fowler

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. — Karen Joy Fowler

I'm seeing so much of America today, Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him - whenever things were not to his liking, he'd say that - I'm seeing so much of America today. — Karen Joy Fowler

What chimps don't seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don't have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality. And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world? — Karen Joy Fowler

My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. — Karen Joy Fowler

...the world runs on the fuel of an endless, fathomless animal misery. — Karen Joy Fowler

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom. — Karen Joy Fowler

Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response - the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. — Karen Joy Fowler

In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention. — Karen Joy Fowler

Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know. — Karen Joy Fowler

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we're completely beside ourselves. — Karen Joy Fowler

They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I'd left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love - as who amongst us is not) — Karen Joy Fowler

I'd no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential - I was torn between the two. — Karen Joy Fowler

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly. — Karen Joy Fowler

One Mother's Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it. — Karen Joy Fowler

I do read all my work aloud as I'm working - this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband's retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I'm alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me. — Karen Joy Fowler

The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study. — Karen Joy Fowler

who knows you better than your own brother? — Karen Joy Fowler

You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it. — Karen Joy Fowler

We don't choose whom we love," he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn't going to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. "But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I'm too much swan for that. — Karen Joy Fowler

If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us. — Karen Joy Fowler

The sunset you see is always better than the one you don't. More stars are always better than less. — Karen Joy Fowler

Fair warning, as it turned out - kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not. — Karen Joy Fowler

Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking. — Karen Joy Fowler

What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now? — Karen Joy Fowler

An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two. — Karen Joy Fowler

I've read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals. — Karen Joy Fowler

You know, I don't think there's anything truly unforgivable. Not where there's love. — Karen Joy Fowler

Out there is South Dakota," Kitch had said, "Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal. — Karen Joy Fowler

Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979. — Karen Joy Fowler

You can't imagine the white-hot fury someone who can't sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him. — Karen Joy Fowler

My husbands weren't any of them bad men, I was the problem. Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

And then I couldn't fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back. I didn't really fall in love until I had that first child. — Karen Joy Fowler

Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it. — Karen Joy Fowler