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

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

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

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

— Karen Joy Fowler

We call them feelings because we feel them.

— Karen Joy Fowler

We don't choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn't going to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. “But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I'm too much swan for that.

— Karen Joy Fowler

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.

— Karen Joy Fowler

What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering.

— Karen Joy Fowler

Who knows you better than your own brother?

— Karen Joy Fowler

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.

— Karen Joy Fowler