Karen Joy Fowler quotes:

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  • I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.

  • Miss Sarzin was the best teacher I ever had.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

  • When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their small sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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)

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • The smart way to build a literary career is you create an identifiable product, then reliably produce that product so people know what they are going to get. That's the smart way to build a career, but not the fun way. Maybe you can think about being less successful and happier. That's an option, too.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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 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?

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • . . . 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.

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • 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.)

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science

  • 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.

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

  • You canĂ¢??t imagine the white-hot fury someone who canĂ¢??t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Each of us has a private Austen.

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