About Karen Joy Fowler: Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation.
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. ...
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.
Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.
I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
The Indians did not like to see anything odd -- a white squirrel, for instance. . . . They thought such oddities were messages, were omens of evil. . . . And the Indians put a great deal of faith in dreams.
He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed.
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
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.
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.
Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.
A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.
A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ign...
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.
But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.
Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.
Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.
who knows you better than your own brother?
Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn't know this, or else he was ig...
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.
I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting ruin?
