Fowler Quotes

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

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.

i love reading because it is fun

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

All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.

If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.

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

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.

The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.

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

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?

I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

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

Won’t we be quite the pair?—you with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile.

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

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.

Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

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.

I can't go back," said Towser. "Nor I," said Fowler. "They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser. "And me," said Fowler, "back into a man.

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.

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?

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

My life has been shaped by the decision two people made over 24 years ago. They decided to adopt a child. They got me, and I got a chance at the kind of life all children deserve.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...] I did not know what to say to this. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mary had typed one line to finish her dissertation – ‘So a life’s work was finally complete’. As an afterthought she had written in pencil, probably after her dissertation had been assessed: ‘What was the red stone that Samuel Fowler disposed of?

The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.

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.

Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say?

Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity.

There's nothing like losing yourself in someone else's troubles to make you forget your own.

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.

But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

Airports and train stations are where you get to cry

Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.

These, gentlemen, are my rules: if I don't succeed, I keep trying; if I do succeed, I keep quiet; and in any case I don't undermine anyone. I'm not an intriguer, and I'm proud of it. I wouldn't make a good diplomat. They also say, gentlemen, that the bird flies to the fowler. That's true, and I'm ready to agree: but who is the fowler here, and who is the bird? That's still a question, gentlemen!

Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

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

Adventure:' there's a word that worked on us both like a charm.

I am made for autumn. Summer and I have a fickle relationship, but everything about autumn is perfect to me. Wooly jumpers, Wellington boot, scarves, thin first, then thick, socks. The low slanting light, the crisp mornings, the chill in my fingers, those last warm sunny days before the rain and the wind. Her moody hues and subdued palate punctuated every now and again by a brilliant orange, scarlet or copper goodbye. She is my true love.

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

Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. - so you can learn. The people around you affect your performance. Choose your crowd wisely.

I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.

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.

He smiled then, and I felt that smile like a vibration moving through me, the way you might feel if you walked through a ghost or it walked through you.

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

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

Having come to the conclusion that there was so much to do that she didn’t know where to start, Mrs Fowler decided not to start at all. She went to the library, took Diary of a Nobody from the shelves and, returning to her wicker chair under the lime tree, settled down to waste what precious hours still remained of the day.

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

There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

6. Before there was any more discussion Fowler pulled his long knife from his belt and prised open the lid of the chest. There was a gasp of astonishment from the company. Where there should have been clothes, there was the Empress Sylva, curled up in a foetal position. She cursed. So near, but still so far.

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds--and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.

This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await.

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.

One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.

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

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

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.

If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.

But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it.

Baby, high school's over. High school's never over..

No writer should be the same as another, that’s not art.

Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.

... while I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.

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?

A book is never finished; it's abandoned.

Coming home seemed to have started the healing process. No longer vivid and garish, the memories seemed to be covered in gossemer, fading behind a curtain of time and forgiveness.

Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.

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

I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.

This is what we've got at the moment, who we are. It's not nearly what we once had- the good, I mean- but it's also not what we once had, meaning the bad.

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.

Scully was appallingly gregarious—so outgoing she was practically incoming.

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.

Are you going to give me a reason to stay?

who knows you better than your own brother?

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.

In my experience, there were two kinds of men. One type—no matter how plain or how poor he might be—is always willing to at least try his luck with an attractive girl. The other type looks upon all of those first types with envy.

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.

Je sentis inconsciemment que tu mènes une double vie, une vie dont une face claire est franchement tournée vers le monde, tandis que l'autre, plongée dans l'ombre, n'est connue que de toi seul. Cette profonde dualité, le secret de ton existence

We all have a sense of level. It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we're entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly. To the detriment of the breed.

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.

In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost. Just for a moment I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.

What should we read next?” Bernadette asked. “Pride and Prejudice is my favorite. So let’s do that,” Sylvia said. Are you sure, dear?” Jocelyn asked, I am. It’s time. Anyway, Persuasion has the dead mother. I don’t want to subject Prudie to that now. The mother in Pride and Prejudice on the other hand…” Don’t give anything away,” Grigg said. “I haven’t read it yet.” Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice. Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice. Grigg had read The Mysteries of Udolpho and God knows how much science fiction – there were books all over the cottage – but he’d never found the time or inclination to read Pride and Prejudice. We really didn’t know what to say.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.