Top 120 Karen Joy Fowler Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “I’ve often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

102. “I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn’t have made them. Freak or fake, I’d been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

103. “Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung?”

— Karen Joy Fowler

104. “This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

106. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

107. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

108. “It’s true that, as my brother grew larger, he also grew dangerous, same as my sister. But they’re still ours and we want them back. They’re needed here at home.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

109. “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?”

— Karen Joy Fowler

110. “Because any misbehavior in a younger child was always the fault of the older. That was how a family worked.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

111. “When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

112. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

113. “I’m red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

114. “Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?”

— Karen Joy Fowler

115. “So the studies don’t back me up. There’ll always be more studies. We’ll change our minds and I’ll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

116. “Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called ‘inference to the best explanation’. It’s a cheap accommodation, and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of those alien overlords.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

117. “Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

119. “My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

120. “There seemed no end to the insane things fathers did to their families.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

121. “I often felt wild back then; I enjoyed the feeling, but nothing had ever come of it.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

122. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

123. “My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

124. “Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

125. “We call them feelings because we feel them.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

126. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

127. “She thinks that she’s performing grief rather than feeling it.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

128. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

130. “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.”

— Karen Joy Fowler