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05039b0
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It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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b22d33c
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Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we'd been hurt ourselves.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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1c05a12
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Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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89427dc
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My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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58f2c50
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They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I'd left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love--as who amongst us is not)
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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3ddb201
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Like they say, you never know a person till you've done time with them.
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person
know
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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b54f8f1
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SO NOW IT'S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat. Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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c03c501
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in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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5c553ba
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I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn't fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Anyway, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have looked like a basketball court. I imagine political upheavals, plots and coups d e'tat, and I reported on them. I think ..
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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2203b40
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The next day I lay out on the grass in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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0a0352b
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Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it's our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient,..
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humanity
imitation
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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294a026
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I couldn't fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back.
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marriage
relatiionships
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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6b0d233
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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 ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning. He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more. We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like ..
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fish
family
conditioning
thanksgiving
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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d49a98d
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No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding someone with no sense of boundaries in my space, fiddling with my things and breaking most of them. Here we go again
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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354b041
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I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.
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choices
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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82e8f05
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Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response--the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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7dd2c8a
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Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I'd thought and I actually had lots of friends.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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92fb51a
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I don't remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn't climb up, because I couldn't reach the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed yourself, my mother said, which..
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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2d9a332
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What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn't have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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c51b037
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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.
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omens
totems
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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2ff8487
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You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it's a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism--all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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14370be
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Let the wild ruckus commence.
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ruckus
wild
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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036f029
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How was your day, Rosie?" Dad would ask when he came home from work and I'd tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. "That's good to hear," he'd say."
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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f56bc1a
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Threadbare, ravaged by love - as who amongst us is not.
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ravaged
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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556bf31
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The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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e0cf42a
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I've read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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74374f1
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There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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47cc65a
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I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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78e934d
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My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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b0db832
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You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they're frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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39a1569
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We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus points for those who get all the way to insects.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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5928b10
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What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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4658d28
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There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. When humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science.)
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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08976dc
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It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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e7daf64
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The men responsible were charged with grand theft. Their original defense, that dolphins are persons (humans in dolphin suits, one defendant said), was quickly thrown out by the judge. I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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621cc30
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I'm being careful with here," Harlow told me, apparently irritated by something I hadn't even had the time to say yet. She was making assumptions about my no-fun-at-all-ness. They were good assumptions."
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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eb25b88
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Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she'd always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist. Every girl's dream, if she can't have a vampire.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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e346892
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The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. --FRANZ KAFKA, "A Report for an Academy"
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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110b7ea
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I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through. A
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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faec308
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Hathos," I offered finally and then thoughtfully provided the definition. "The pleasure you get from hating something." --
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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144ed30
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No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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2584a33
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Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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a5423af
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Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never ever call. Three words were scratched in ballpoint blue on the wall above the phone. Think a head. I thought how that was good advice, but maybe a bit late for anyone using that phone. I thought how it would be a good name for a beauty salon.
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Karen Joy Fowler |
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32ce203
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I DIDN'T KNOW what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. As if I were looking in a mirror.
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Karen Joy Fowler |