Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

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

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

who knows you better than your own brother?

~ 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

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

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)

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

We call them feelings because we feel them.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

The idea of our own rationality...was convincing to us only because we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist, the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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. (Chapter four pg 202)

~ 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

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ 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

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

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

~ Karen Joy Fowler

Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.

~ Karen Joy Fowler