Top 100 Karen Joy Fowler Quotes
#2. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#3. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#4. I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
Karen Joy Fowler
#6. My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.
Karen Joy Fowler
#7. Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#8. 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
#9. I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don't mean to complain about that.
Karen Joy Fowler
#10. It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept.
Karen Joy Fowler
#12. Don't side with assholes, she said. Her voice was very not chill.
Karen Joy Fowler
#13. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#14. 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
#15. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#16. So I could see that Harlow was fundamentally untrustworthy. Simultaneously, she seemed like someone with whom I could be my true self. I had no intention of doing so and, with and equal and counterbalancing intensity, a great longing for it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#17. I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
Karen Joy Fowler
#18. All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.
Karen Joy Fowler
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#21. He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed.
Karen Joy Fowler
#22. Out there is South Dakota," Kitch had said, "Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.
Karen Joy Fowler
#23. We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies,
Karen Joy Fowler
#24. Like they say, you never know a person till you've done time with them.
Karen Joy Fowler
#25. I'd no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential - I was torn between the two.
Karen Joy Fowler
#26. The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind.
Karen Joy Fowler
#27. Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#28. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't
Karen Joy Fowler
#29. 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
#30. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#36. 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
#37. I do read all my work aloud as I'm working - this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband's retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I'm alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me.
Karen Joy Fowler
#38. 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?
Karen Joy Fowler
#39. In Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees
Karen Joy Fowler
#40. I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out
Karen Joy Fowler
#41. 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
#42. Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.
Karen Joy Fowler
#44. 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
#45. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I'm not.
Karen Joy Fowler
#46. 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
#47. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#48. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#49. But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.
Karen Joy Fowler
#50. 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
#51. Solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside
Karen Joy Fowler
#52. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#53. I wasn't happy, exactly, but I was remembering how happiness felt.
Karen Joy Fowler
#54. 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
#55. My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.
Karen Joy Fowler
#56. 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
#57. Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#58. I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.
Karen Joy Fowler
#59. Ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be. With Harlow.
Karen Joy Fowler
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher.
Karen Joy Fowler
#64. 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
#65. The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch
Karen Joy Fowler
#66. If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.
Karen Joy Fowler
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'
Karen Joy Fowler
#70. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. You can't imagine the white-hot fury someone who can't sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.
Karen Joy Fowler
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. We used to believe that memories are best retrieved in the same place where they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore. But
Karen Joy Fowler
#85. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#87. I learned how to comport myself among trolls, elves, hobbits or goblins. I learned that a friend can be lost to greed and avarice. I learned that solving riddles may be as important a survival skill as bowmanship. I know how to talk to a dragon, and that it's best not to.
Karen Joy Fowler
#88. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#89. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.
Karen Joy Fowler
#90. Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen?
Karen Joy Fowler
#91. Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
Karen Joy Fowler
#92. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#93. Jocelyn was dumbstruck. She couldn't think of a single thing
she'd done that might give that impression. "I don't.
Karen Joy Fowler
#94. The sunset you see is always better than the one you don't. More stars are always better than less.
Karen Joy Fowler
#95. 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
#96. But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things.
Karen Joy Fowler
#97. There's no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do.
Karen Joy Fowler
#98. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#99. But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.
Karen Joy Fowler
#100. 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
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