Quotes from Karen Joy Fowler

SO NOW IT'S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat. Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.

Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us.

My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story. The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.

The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch

I DIDN'T KNOW what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror.

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. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who dont; it's the Emperor's New Clothes gone global.

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.

At five of five, I called the airline number—800-FUCK-YOU—and was told I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered in Sacramento, though my call was important to them.

My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.

You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they're frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so.

He repeated a thing he'd said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d'être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. "The only difference," he said, "is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God's orders.

Let the wild ruckus commence.

The secret to a good life, he once told me, '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.' - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

How was your day, Rosie?" Dad would ask when he came home from work and I'd tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. "That's good to hear," he'd say.

Threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not.

It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.

Hathos," I offered finally and then thoughtfully provided the definition. "The pleasure you get from hating something.

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it.

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

The men responsible were charged with grand theft. Their original defense, that dolphins are persons (humans in dolphin suits, one defendant said), was quickly thrown out by the judge. I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.

I'm being careful with here, Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn't even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost.

What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn't have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.