Top 100 Karen Joy Quotes
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.
Karen Joy Fowler
#6. 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
#7. Although it may not seem like it, this isn't a story about darkness. It's about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you've never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I'm going to hold a lot of joy.
Karen Marie Moning
#8. 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
#9. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#10. 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?
Karen Joy Fowler
#11. My pains are but trifling things compared to my joy.
Karen Cushman
#12. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#13. Just ask yourself, if we weren't taught to be women, what would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you're a man, and don't cheat by changing the words.)
Karen Joy Fowler
#14. 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
#15. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.
Karen DeCrow
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science
Karen Joy Fowler
#19. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't
Karen Joy Fowler
#20. Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#21. The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind.
Karen Joy Fowler
#22. I'd no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential - I was torn between the two.
Karen Joy Fowler
#23. Like they say, you never know a person till you've done time with them.
Karen Joy Fowler
#24. You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#25. We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies,
Karen Joy Fowler
#26. Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.
Karen Joy Fowler
#27. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain. Alina was the lucky one. Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering.
Karen Marie Moning
#28. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I'm not.
Karen Joy Fowler
#32. Please do not become so hurt by life that when someone loving comes along, or something good happens, you resist allowing the love and joy in.
Karen Salmansohn
#33. There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.
Karen Joy Fowler
#34. My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.
Karen Joy Fowler
#35. 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
#37. Where you succeed will never so much matter as where you fail.
-We Are All Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler
#38. Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.
Karen Joy Fowler
#39. Out there is South Dakota," Kitch had said, "Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.
Karen Joy Fowler
#40. Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.
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. I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out
Karen Joy Fowler
#43. Even in the darkest clouds
There are specks of joy
Out of the darkness
Comes light
Just as day
Always follows night
Karen Hackel
#44. In Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees
Karen Joy Fowler
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we're completely beside ourselves.
Karen Joy Fowler
#50. 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
#51. I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
Karen Joy Fowler
#52. 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
#53. Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.
Karen Joy Fowler
#54. I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#55. It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept.
Karen Joy Fowler
#56. The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#57. Don't let the darkness of your past block the light of joy in your present. What happened is done. Stop giving time to things that no longer exist when there is so much joy to be found in the here and now.
Karen Salmansohn
#58. I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don't mean to complain about that.
Karen Joy Fowler
#59. 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
#60. If we see a sad rain, it doesn't mean the rain is sad, but it means we see it. That's an easily dismissible kind of projection. But what I'm struggling to say, is that we take that rain in through our own hearts and emotions and senses and skin, and all those filters have an impact.
Karen Joy Fowler
#61. Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#62. 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
#65. There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I'd rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.
Karen Marie Moning
#66. When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.
Karen Joy Fowler
#67. 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
#68. Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.
Karen Russell
#69. 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
#72. A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.
Karen Joy Fowler
#73. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#74. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#75. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#76. All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.
Karen Joy Fowler
#77. He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed.
Karen Joy Fowler
#78. Leaves grow old gracefully, bring such joy in their last lingering days. How vibrant and bright is their final flurry of life.
Karen Gibbs
#79. I know that when he has sex he laughs like the world is a perfect place. And when he did that, my hands curled into fists because I thought about touching his face like maybe I could catch joy in my hands and hold it.
Karen Marie Moning
#80. We sat around our own table, an island of sad reflection in an ocean of merry din.
Karen Joy Fowler
#81. Scully was appallingly gregarious - so outgoing she was practically incoming.
Karen Joy Fowler
#82. 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
#83. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.
Karen Joy Fowler
#84. I would be a wedge-tailed eagle. I would only live for the joy of flight. I would soar at great heights, on top of the wind. I would be above everything, over the little towns clinging to the highway. I would be a part of everything.
Karen Foxlee
#85. It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.
Karen Joy Fowler
#86. Fair warning, as it turned out - kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.
Karen Joy Fowler
#87. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
Karen Joy Fowler
#92. You are nothing like Christine!" he said, in my face. "She was a responsibility, a mistake I made when young and foolish, and from whom I came to believe I would never be free!"
"Then what am I?" I challenged, staring up into blazing sapphire eyes.
"A joy.
Karen Chance
#93. Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.
Karen Joy Fowler
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. If you weaken, I'll be strong. If you get lost, I'll be your way home. If you despair, I'll bring you joy. I will love you until the end of time.
Karen Marie Moning
#99. Flesh does strange things to memory. Pain and joy both alter it. When you are happy, you remember things one way. When you are sad, you remember them another. And sometimes the flesh does not admit that memory is real at all or plucks false memories out of thin air.
Tanya Karen Gough
#100. Don't side with assholes, she said. Her voice was very not chill.
Karen Joy Fowler
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