Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.

Karen Joy Fowler
Where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

Karen Joy Fowler
In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.

Karen Joy Fowler
Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.

Karen Joy Fowler
Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

Karen Joy Fowler
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.

Karen Joy Fowler
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, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.

Karen Joy Fowler
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

Karen Joy Fowler
Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.

Karen Joy Fowler
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.

Karen Joy Fowler
I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.

Karen Joy Fowler
Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

Karen Joy Fowler
In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery.

Karen Joy Fowler
You can't imagine the white-hot fury someone who can't sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

Karen Joy Fowler
Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.

Karen Joy Fowler
In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'

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

Karen Joy Fowler
Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.

Karen Joy Fowler
It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

Karen Joy Fowler
A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.

Karen Joy Fowler
I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?

Karen Joy Fowler
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied.

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

Karen Joy Fowler
You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.

Karen Joy Fowler
Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.

Karen Joy Fowler
You know, I don't think there's anything truly unforgivable. Not where there's love.

Karen Joy Fowler
I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

Karen Joy Fowler
I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.

Karen Joy Fowler