Quotes from Karen Joy Fowler

She told him he was très cool and also, paradoxically, très hot. He was one quick ticket to ooh-lala land.

So I could see that Harlow was fundamentally untrustworthy. Simultaneously, she seemed like someone with whom I could be my true self. I had no intention of doing so and, with and equal and counterbalancing intensity, a great longing for it.

The value of money is a scam             perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't

At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't

The white culture rewarded cruelty with honor and friendship.

I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out

Jocelyn was dumbstruck. She couldn't think of a single thing she'd done that might give that impression. "I don't.

Instead I watched our mother obsessively for signs of breakage.

Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she'd always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist. Every girl's dream, if she can't have a vampire. (Chapter four pg 202)

One day a package of junior-sized tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring, so I didn't read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind luck I didn't smoke them.

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

But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail. .

What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.

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

It's really easy to persuade people to be hateful

The value of money is a scam perpetuated by those who have it over those who don't.

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.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy.

You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been

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

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.

People earn the way they are missed.

ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be. With Harlow.