Top 120 Karen Joy Fowler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

53. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

54. “In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. 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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

55. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “We all have a sense of level. It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we’re entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly. To the detriment of the breed.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

60. “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

61. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

62. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

63. “Like they say, you never know a person till you’ve done time with them.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

66. “I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

67. “An “attack on SeaWorld” might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn’t always seem to distinguish between the two.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

68. “There’s no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

69. “Do unto others’ is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy – that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

70. “Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

71. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

72. “We don’t choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn’t going to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. “But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I’m too much swan for that.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

73. “I admired her choices though I wouldn’t have made them.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

74. “I couldn’t fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I’d lop some part off, but then I’d start missing it, wanting it back.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

75. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

76. “A quote hung on the opposite wall: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

77. “It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

78. “I’m seeing so much of America today,” Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him – whenever things were not to his liking, he’d say that – I’m seeing so much of America today.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

80. “I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential – I was torn between the two.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

81. “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

82. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

83. “There was no point in telling my father. He’d never let me quit after only one day. He couldn’t help me and he’d make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

85. “I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

86. “The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

87. “Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I’d thought and I actually had lots of friends.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

88. “It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

89. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

90. “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

91. “You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it’s a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism – all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

92. “We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

93. “Scully was appallingly gregarious – so outgoing she was practically incoming.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

94. “No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding someone with no sense of boundaries in my space, fiddling with my things and breaking most of them. Here we go again.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

95. “If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

96. “She’d just rear-ended a cop car and she said that only the week before she’d been arrested shoplifting tortillas and salsa for a Sunday afternoon football party at her house. ‘This is so not good,’ she told me. ‘Honestly, I have the worst luck.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

97. “But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

98. “What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?”

— Karen Joy Fowler

99. “Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. 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, but I forget exactly what that reason is.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

100. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler