Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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..

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?

My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.

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

Life is all arrivals and departures.

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

who knows you better than your own brother?

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.

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.

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.

An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

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

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

I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.

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.

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

A quote hung on the opposite wall: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

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.

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.

A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.

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

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.

There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.

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.

Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we’d been hurt ourselves.

IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.

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

Like they say, you never know a person till you’ve done time with them.

A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.

Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.

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

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

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.

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.

the happening and the 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.

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.

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?

In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

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.

in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees

Threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not.

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

Reading Austen is a frickin' mine field.

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.

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.

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.

He didn't believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn't much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.

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.

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)

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.

In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

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.

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.

Let the wild ruckus commence.

The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.

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.

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?

Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung?

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it.

What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

The next day I lay out on the grass in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.

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.

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.

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

No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding someone with no sense of boundaries in my space, fiddling with my things and breaking most of them. Here we go again

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.

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. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who dont; it's the Emperor's New Clothes gone global.

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.

Hathos,” I offered finally and then thoughtfully provided the definition. “The pleasure you get from hating something.

There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)

It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?

Because any misbehavior in a younger child was always the fault of the older. That was how a family worked.

She thinks that she’s performing grief rather than feeling it.

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother—I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving.

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

I wasn't happy, exactly, but I was remembering how happiness felt.

There seemed no end to the insane things fathers did to their families.

A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ignoring the court order to appear and defend themselves. Bartholomé Chassenée argued successfully that the rats hadn't come because the court had failed to provide reasonable protection from the village cats along the route.

Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it’s our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is.

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.

Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she’d always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist. Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.

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.

I'm being careful with here," Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn't even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions.

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.

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!

He repeated a thing he’d said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d’être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. “The only difference,” he said, “is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God’s orders.

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.

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.

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.

My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story. The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The men responsible were charged with grand theft. Their original defense, that dolphins are persons (humans in dolphin suits, one defendant said), was quickly thrown out by the judge. I’m unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.

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.

You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been

I often felt wild back then; I enjoyed the feeling, but nothing had ever come of it.

...the world runs on the fuel of an endless, fathomless animal misery.

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. Both

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

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.

Yes, it is. I’m leaving the marriage, I’m not leaving you. As long as you’re in the house, I’ll take care of the house.” “Fuck off,” said Sylvia.

Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.

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

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.

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?

I’m red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes.

Pheromones are Earth’s primordial idiom.

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

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

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

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.

Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.

The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. —FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy

I opened the door to The Graduate and slid into the din. I'd been considering telling Harlow what I'd just learned about chimp sex. Much would depend on how drunk I got.

People earn the way they are missed.

Before, my brother was part of the family. After, he was just killing time until he could be shed of us.

It's true that, as my brother grew larger, he also grew dangerous, same as my sister. But they're still ours and we want them back. They're needed here at home.

Grief had destroyed Rosalie’s parents. It seemed that God had reached down and scooped out the middle of the family as casually as if he were eating a watermelon.

The storm which blew me out of my past eased off.

Don’t side with assholes,” she said. Her voice was very not chill.

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

We call them feelings because we feel them.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

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

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.

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.

When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three.

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.

I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.

Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called 'inference to the best explanation'. It's a cheap accommodation, and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of those alien overlords.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly 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.

Mother was just as glad to have me out of the house and harm’s way. She did give me some advice. You can always tell a cult from a religion, she said, because a cult is just a set of rules that lets certain men get laid.

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.

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.

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.

I don't remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn't climb up, because I couldn't reach the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed yourself, my mother said, which would have been true if I'd fallen from the upstairs. But I made it almost the whole way down, which no one seemed to notice. What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn't have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

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.

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. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't; it's the Emperors's New Clothes gone global.

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

Whatev was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then. There was the thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant Loser. The whatev W could be flipped up and down, W to M to W to M, in which case it meant Whatever, your mother works at McDonald’s. ’Cause that’s the way we rolled back in ’92.

I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn’t fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Anyway, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have looked like a basketball court. I imagine political upheavals, plots and coups d e’tat, and I reported on them. I think I may have been reading a biography of Mary Queen of Scots at the time…. Anyway, there was this short news day for the ants. I’d run out of political plots, or I was bored with them. So I got a glass of water and I created a flood. The ants scrambled for safety, swimming for their lives. I was kind of ashamed, but it made for good copy. I told myself I was bringing excitement into their usual humdrum. The next day, I dropped a rock on them. It was a meteorite from outer space. They gathered around it and ran up and over it; obviously they didn’t know what to do. It prompted three letters to the editor.

Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never ever call. Three words were scratched in ballpoint blue on the wall above the phone. Think a head. I thought how that was good advice, but maybe a bit late for anyone using that phone. I thought how it would be a good name for a beauty salon.

I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in themselves, change who we are. We need to be like water, she wrote. Water can be "divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to always go in the direction it must go." The water metaphor takes me many places. It takes me to the melting Arctic ice and the rising sea levels. It takes me to the Gulf of Mexico and Deepwater Horizon. It takes me to the toxic tap water of Flint, Michigan, and Corpus Christi, Texas, and Hoosick Falls, New York. It takes me to the water cannons used against you. But it also takes me to you, oh water protectors!

And this is a small point by comparison, but why do Republicans persist in substituting "Democrat," with its "rat" ending, when "Democratic" would be correct? Because they want us to know, in every word they speak, how much they hold us in contempt. In my lifetime, the Republicans have never accepted a Democratic president as legitimate, no matter how many people vote for him [or her.])

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. the value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't; it's Emperor's New Clothes gone global. If chimps used money and we didn't, we wouldn't admire it. We'd find it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold? Chimps barter with meat. The value of meat is self-evident.

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.