Quotes from Karen Joy Fowler

A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ignoring the court order to appear and defend themselves. Bartholomé Chassenée argued successfully that the rats hadn't come because the court had failed to provide reasonable protection from the village cats along the route.

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.

Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see or smell it?

IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don't see it, but it's obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It's hard to always come in second.

A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.

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

Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we'd been hurt ourselves.

IN EVERYONE'S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.

We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus points for those who get all the way to insects.

There's no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do.

Like they say, you never know a person till you've done time with them.

Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it's our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is.

I couldn't 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 I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back.

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I'd thought and I actually had lots of friends.

Reading Austen is a frickin' mine field.

Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.

in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees

Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it's a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism—all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.

They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I'd left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not)

The next day I lay out on the grass in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.

No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding someone with no sense of boundaries in my space, fiddling with my things and breaking most of them. Here we go again