"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 wit..."
- Karen Joy Fowler
"I’m seeing so much of America today,” Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him — whenever things were not to his liking, he’d say that — I’m see..."
"I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)"
"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."
"Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture."
"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..."
"We call them feelings because we feel them."
"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."
"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. Langua..."
"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..."