Quotes from Karen Joy Fowler

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

Airports and train stations are where you get to cry

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

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.

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

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)

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.

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

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.

who knows you better than your own brother?