Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

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.

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

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

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

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.

The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there's a benefit to not sharing a language.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

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

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.

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.