Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

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

Baby, high school's over.
High school's never over..

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

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

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

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.

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.

So this is what I said to Mom; this is what I meant to say -
That there was something inside Fern I didn't know.
That I didn't know her in the way I'd always thought I did.
That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.
Instead I'd said I was afraid of her. That was the lie that got her sent away.

Scully was appallingly gregarious - so outgoing she was practically incoming.

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.

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.

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

My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher.

Each of us has a private Austen.

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 felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked, and struck each other a hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on the surface of my skin.

You can't imagine the white-hot fury someone who can't sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.

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.

What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.

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.

But the most fantastical of my imaginary worlds turned out to be the one I'd thought was real. As a child, I believed the world was run by competent, sane and benevolent adults. I believed this for much longer than I believed in Santa Claus.
That belief has since gone down like the Titanic (on which I also spent a lot of time as a child). The world is run by nitwits and psychopaths.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

She'd just rear-ended a cop car and she said that only the week before she'd been arrested shoplifting tortillas and salsa for a Sunday afternoon football party at her house. 'This is so not good,' she told me. 'Honestly, I have the worst luck.

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.

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

This was the last party Mrs. Radford would attend in San Francisco. One month later she left on a boat filled with missionaries going to Hawaii. One year later she was one of only seven white women in Edo, Japan. From there she sailed to Russia; from there she made her way to Peking. She died somewhere near Chunking at the age of seventy-four.

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

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.

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.

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.

There's no money in Thomas More's Utopia, nor private property, either - these things are too ugly for the Utopians, who must be protected from life's rougher aspects. The Zapolets, a nearby tribe, fight some of their wars for them. Slaves butcher their meat. Thomas More worries that the Utopians would lose their delicate affections and merciful sympathies if they did those deeds themselves. The Zapolets, we are assured, delight in slaughter and rapine, but there's no discussion of the impact of butchery on the slaves. No Utopia is Utopia for everyone.

But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

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.

But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it.

Where you succeed will never so much matter as where you fail.
-We Are All Beside Ourselves

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.

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!

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

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

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

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?

It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept.

In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'

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.

All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader.

Life is all arrivals and departures.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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

Solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do onto others as you would have others do unto you'" is our highest, most developed morality", Dr. Sosa said. "And really the only one necessary; all the others flow from that; you don't need Ten Commandments. But if you do believe, as I do, that morality starts with God, then you have to wonder why He simultanelously hardwired us against it.

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

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.

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?

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

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be. With Harlow.

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

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.

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

Out there is South Dakota," Kitch had said, "Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.