Best 61 quotes of Karen Joy Fowler on MyQuotes

Karen Joy Fowler

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    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.

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    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)

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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?

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    . . . strange and fantastic things really happen. During a rainstorm in Australia, fish fall from the sky; several Southern states consider legislation that would make the licking of toads illegal; Lisa Presley marries Michael Jackson. You read these things and you think to yourself that realism may not be the best medium through which to express the real world.

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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)

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn't know this, or else he was ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning. He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more. We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized. It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    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.

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story. The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    No more politics, Grandma Donna had said as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn't agree to disagree and all of us had access to cutlery.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

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

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    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.

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    Karen Joy Fowler

    Sylvia’s first impression of Allegra was that no one had ever before had such a beautiful baby. Jocelyn’s first impression of Grigg was that he had nice eyelashes and a funny name, and didn’t interest her in the slightest. Prudie’s first impression of Bernadette was that she was startling to look at and dull if you listened, which you hardly ever had to do. Bernadette’s first impression of Prudie was that, in all her long years, she had rarely seen such a frightened young woman. Grigg’s first impression of Jocelyn was that she appeared to think sharing an elevator with him for a few floors was some sort of punishment. Allegra’s first impression of Sylvia was blurred with her first impression of the larger world. For me? she’d asked herself back when she had no words and no way to even know she was asking. And then, when Sylvia, and then, when Daniel had first looked into her eyes — More for me?