Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowleris an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth7 February 1950
CountryUnited States of America
bled color courses gets high history irrational left lens living looked period school strange time
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.
couple gone mixed success
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.
came characters coffee complain drink filled hear hearing left life loathing trust writers
I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.
assume closer creatures limited people
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.
dared
I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.
tree immortality
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
letters underestimate wells
Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
way arriving punctuality
Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.
june people mad
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.
utopia
No Utopia is Utopia for everyone
gone way saying-nothing
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.
grateful parent complaining
I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.
mistake sin sometimes
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 sin?
memories mean different
The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.