181 Quotes by Karen Joy Fowler

"There's no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do."

"In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery."

"So the studies don't back me up. There'll always be more studies. We'll change our minds and I'll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong."

"Pheromones are Earth’s primordial idiom."

"The other guy is obviously meant for me. He's quite short. I don't care about that. I'm quite short myself. I prefer beta males to alphas. Only he keeps telling me to smile. "Nothing's as bad as all that," he says. If I were five years old, I'd have bitten him by now."

"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?"

"I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn’t have made them. Freak or fake, I’d been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both."

"Do unto others’ is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity."

"When a portent repeats itself three times, like something out of Julius Caesar, even Caliban, a couple of plays over, is bound to notice."

"Life is all arrivals and departures."