Quotes from 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.

Life is all arrivals and departures.

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.

He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.

My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.

In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

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.

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

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.

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.

Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act.

An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

I'd no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we're completely beside ourselves.

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.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.

We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies

the happening and the 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.

A quote hung on the opposite wall: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study.

It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.

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.

It was one of those subjects to which everything that slithers across your brain seems relevant. I find this to be true of most topics.

He didn't believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn't much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.