Top 120 Karen Joy Fowler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. Where humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

4. “When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

5. “No Utopia is Utopia for everyone.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

6. “Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

7. “You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

8. “Pheromones are Earth’s primordial idiom.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

9. “Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

10. “Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer from it.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

11. “Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

12. “Life is all arrivals and departures.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

14. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

15. “The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

16. “I still haven’t found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

17. “Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

18. “The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

19. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

20. “Where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

21. “In everyone’s life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

22. “Each of us has a private Austen.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

23. “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

24. “The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. – FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

25. “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 it with excellence.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

26. “You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”

— Karen Joy Fowler

27. “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

28. “An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

29. “I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

30. “My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

31. “Let the wild ruckus commence.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

32. “The other guy is obviously meant for me. He’s quite short. I don’t care about that. I’m quite short myself. I prefer beta males to alphas. Only he keeps telling me to smile. “Nothing’s as bad as all that,” he says. If I were five years old, I’d have bitten him by now.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

33. “Fair warning, as it turned out – kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

34. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

35. “Baby, high school’s over. High school’s never over...”

— Karen Joy Fowler

36. “It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique – our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language – some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

39. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

41. “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

42. “There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

43. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

44. “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

45. “You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

46. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

47. “He didn’t believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn’t much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

48. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

49. “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?”

— Karen Joy Fowler

50. “You know, I don’t think there’s anything truly unforgivable. Not where there’s love.”

— Karen Joy Fowler