Quotes from Karen Joy Fowler

Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung?

I opened the door to The Graduate and slid into the din. I'd been considering telling Harlow what I'd just learned about chimp sex. Much would depend on how drunk I got.

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff.

Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. I'd come to see the heavens, our father always said. But the stars were in her eyes, a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love.

Grief had destroyed Rosalie's parents. It seemed that God had reached down and scooped out the middle of the family as casually as if he were eating a watermelon.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book. Both

One Mother's Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it.

But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things.

Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen?

We call them feelings because we feel them.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

Whatev was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then. There was the thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant Loser. The whatev W could be flipped up and down, W to M to W to M, in which case it meant Whatever, your mother works at McDonald's. 'Cause that's the way we rolled back in '92.

She used to grip me so tightly that the only way I could put her down was to pry her loose, one digit at a time. For two years, I had bruises from her fingers and toes all over my body.

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 don't; it's Emperor's New Clothes gone global. If chimps used money and we didn't, we wouldn't admire it. We'd find it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold? Chimps barter with meat. The value of meat is self-evident.

The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. —FRANZ KAFKA, "A Report for an Academy

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

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother—I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving.

Before, my brother was part of the family. After, he was just killing time until he could be shed of us.

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.

No more politics, Grandma Donna had said as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn't agree to disagree and all of us had access to cutlery.

Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I'm not.

intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science's excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes

The monkey girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum?

One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn't see them, or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking.