Quotes from Karen Joy Fowler

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

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.

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.

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.

The sunset you see is always better than the one you don't. More stars are always better than less.

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.

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.

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

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.

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