Karen Joy Quotes & Sayings

The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second. — Karen Joy Fowler

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation. — Karen Joy Fowler

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader. — 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

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story. — 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

SO NOW IT'S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat. Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break. — 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

Joy, that elusive, priceless commodity, was once again his. — Karen Marie Moning

It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept. — Karen Joy Fowler

Reading Austen is a frickin' mine field. — 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

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

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

We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies, — 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

I would be a wedge-tailed eagle. I would only live for the joy of flight. I would soar at great heights, on top of the wind. I would be above everything, over the little towns clinging to the highway. I would be a part of everything. — Karen Foxlee

I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I've had to write what I've wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer. — 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

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

This was the last party Mrs. Radford would attend in San Francisco. One month later she left on a boat filled with missionaries going to Hawaii. One year later she was one of only seven white women in Edo, Japan. From there she sailed to Russia; from there she made her way to Peking. She died somewhere near Chunking at the age of seventy-four. — 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

Do unto others' is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy - that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity. — Karen Joy Fowler

Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain ... Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing. — Karen Marie Moning

When we'd gone to Disneyland, the tree house had been my favorite thing in the whole park. If only I'd had no parents watching my every move, if only I'd been a happy, carefree orphan, I'd have hidden under the player piano until everything closed, and then taken up residence there. — Karen Joy Fowler

Although Jillian had known what Grimm was before that moment, she was briefly immobilized by the sight of him. It was one thing to know that the man she loved was a Berserker-it was another thing entirely to behold it. He regarded her with such an inhuman expression that if she hadn't peered deep into his eyes, she might have seen nothing of Grimm at all. But there, deep in the flickering blue flames, she glimpsed such love that it rocked her soul. She smiled up at him through her tears.
A wounded sound of disbelief escaped him.
Jillian gave him the most dazzling smile she could muster and placed her fist to her heart. "And the daughter wed the lion king," she said clearly.
An expression of incredulity crossed the warrior's face. His blue eyes widened and he stared at her in stunned silence.
"I love you, Gavrael McIllioch."
When he smiled, his face blazed with love. He tossed his head back and shouted his joy to the sky. — Karen Marie Moning

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

I'm not going anywhere, dear heart. I have a happy ending to write with you." Addie stiffened. "You heard that?" she muttered against his chest. Gideon chuckled, his joy too large to contain. He pulled back just enough to see her face. "Yes, I did, my little dreamer. And I plan to fulfill that duty to the best of my ability. — Karen Witemeyer

Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you. — Karen Joy Fowler

Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. "I'd come to see the heavens," our father always said. "But the stars were in her eyes," a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love. — Karen Joy Fowler

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep. — Karen Joy Fowler

You've heard tales of beauty and the beast. How a fair maid falls in love with a monster and sees the beauty of his soul beneath the hideous visage. But you've never heard the tale of the handsome man falling for the monstrous woman and finding joy in her love, because it doesn't happen, not even in a story-teller's tale. — Karen Maitland

There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face. — Karen Joy Fowler

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families. — 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

Strange and fantastic things really happen. During a rainstorm in Australia, fish fall from the sky; several Southern states consider legislation that would make the licking of toads illegal; Lisa Presley marries Michael Jackson. You read these things and you think to yourself that realism may not be the best medium through which to express the real world. — Karen Joy Fowler

In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' — Karen Joy Fowler

The secret to a good life, he once told me, '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.'
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves — Karen Joy Fowler

It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique
our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language
some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years. — Karen Joy Fowler

You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they're frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so. — 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

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

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out. — Karen Joy Fowler

Flesh does strange things to memory. Pain and joy both alter it. When you are happy, you remember things one way. When you are sad, you remember them another. And sometimes the flesh does not admit that memory is real at all or plucks false memories out of thin air. — Tanya Karen Gough

He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed. — Karen Joy Fowler

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

The other guy is obviously meant for me. He's quite short. I don't care about that. I'm quite short myself. I prefer beta males to alphas. Only he keeps telling me to smile. "Nothing's as bad as all that," he says. If I were five years old, I'd have bitten him by now. — Karen Joy Fowler

We sat around our own table, an island of sad reflection in an ocean of merry din. — Karen Joy Fowler

Let the wild ruckus commence. — Karen Joy Fowler

He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out. — Karen Joy Fowler

The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there's a benefit to not sharing a language. — Karen Joy Fowler

The Indians did not like to see anything odd
a white squirrel, for instance ... They thought such oddities were messages, were omens of evil ... And the Indians put a great deal of faith in dreams. — 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

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

My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher. — 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

Once, he'd dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world. — Karen Joy Fowler

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

Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary. — Karen Joy Fowler

When a portent repeats itself three times, like something out of Julius Caesar, even Caliban, a couple of plays over, is bound to notice. — Karen Joy Fowler

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place. — Karen Russell

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book. — Karen Joy Fowler

In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will. — 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

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter. — Karen Joy Fowler

intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science's excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes — Karen Joy Fowler

Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. — Karen Marie Moning

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

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

You're grumpy and broody and secretive all the time. You're no joy to live with, I can tell you that!"
"I smile sometimes. I even laughed about your ... hat."
"MacHalo," I corrected tightly. "It's a brilliant invention, and it means I don't need you or V'lane to keep my safe from Shades, and that, Jericho Barrons, is worth its weight in gold: not needing either of you for something! — Karen Marie Moning

Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else's intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world. — Karen Joy Fowler

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

If you weaken, I'll be strong. If you get lost, I'll be your way home. If you despair, I'll bring you joy. I will love you until the end of time. — Karen Marie Moning

Hope strengthens. Fear kills[ ... ] That simple adage is master of every situation, every choice. Each morning we wake up, we get to choose between hope and fear and apply one of those emotions to everything we do. Do we greet things that come our way with joy? Or suspicion? — Karen Marie Moning

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

Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see or smell it? — 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

Travis, I love you with all of my being, but I love Cassie, too. And right now she needs me more than you do. Forgive me. Meri She loved him. The wonder of the statement seeped into him, but the joy that should have accompanied the knowledge faded beneath his growing frustration and fear. How could she possibly think that anyone needed her more than he did? She was his heart, his very life. If anything happened to her . . . Travis tore the top page from the tablet and hardened his jaw. He'd just have to make sure nothing did happen. After all, if a wife was going to tell her husband she loved him, she ought to do it in person. And he aimed to see that she did precisely that. Right after he kissed the living fire out of her and showed her exactly how much he truly needed her. — Karen Witemeyer

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

I DIDN'T KNOW what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror. — Karen Joy Fowler

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

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding. — Karen Joy Fowler

This mind is an amazing thing. It can conjure love from the scent of orange blossoms, peace from a dry breeze, and joy from a patch of grass on a summer day. — Karen Maezen Miller

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

Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I'd thought and I actually had lots of friends. — 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

The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. — Karen Joy Fowler