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Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

Karen Joy Fowler Quotes.

In the phrase ‘ human being,’ the word ‘being’ is much more important than the word ‘human.’
Karen Joy Fowler
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
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
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
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
Each of us has a private Austen.
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 have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader.
Karen Joy Fowler
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.
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
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
No Utopia is Utopia for everyone
Karen Joy Fowler
Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Karen Joy Fowler
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.
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
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
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
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.
Karen Joy Fowler
I can’t say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.
Karen Joy Fowler
Technically a memoir, ‘The Woman Warrior’ becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.
Karen Joy Fowler
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
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.
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
Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
Karen Joy Fowler
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.)
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