Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

In the phrase ‘ human being,’ the word ‘being’ is much more important than the word ‘human.’

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

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.

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

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.

Each of us has a private Austen.

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

I have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader.

I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I’m often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history – high school and college courses – a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You’re left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you’re actually living through.

If I’m made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as – if we’d been very, very good – she read the next chapter of ‘The Hobbit’ aloud to us.

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

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.

I learned how to comport myself among trolls, elves, hobbits or goblins. I learned that a friend can be lost to greed and avarice. I learned that solving riddles may be as important a survival skill as bowmanship. I know how to talk to a dragon, and that it’s best not to.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It’s not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

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

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

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

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.

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

Butler’s novel ‘Kindred’ may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.

I can’t say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.

Technically a memoir, ‘The Woman Warrior’ becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.

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.

I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I’ve had to write what I’ve wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer.

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

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

Just ask yourself, if we weren’t taught to be women, what would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you’re a man, and don’t cheat by changing the words.)

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.