Quotes by Karen Joy Fowler

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

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

There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the authors 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.

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.

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

I couldnt 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 Id lop some part off, but then Id start missing it, wanting it back.

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.

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I cant tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who dont; its the Emperors New Clothes gone global.

who knows you better than your own brother?

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.

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.

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)

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and Im the only one who doesnt suffer from it.

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.

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.

We call them feelings because we feel them.

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, thats not so clear anymore.

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.

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.