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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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

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?

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

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.

who knows you better than your own brother?

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

Life is all arrivals and departures.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.