We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.

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.

In most families, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don’t see it, but it’s obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It’s hard to always come in second. It’s also hard to be the favorite. Earned or unearned, the favorite is a burdensome thing to be.

Catachresis?

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.

When you think of three things to say, pick one and only say that.

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

where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

How to read children’s faces, which are less guarded than grown-ups’, though not as expressive as chimps’.

That big words do not impress children. And that grown-ups care a lot about what big words actually mean, so it’s best to know that before you use one.

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.

Maybe sedulously making sure that no one really knew me was an impediment to friendship.

When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.

And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.”

she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.

“You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep feels toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”

“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.

We call them feelings because we feel them. They don’t start in our minds, they arise in our bodies,

in Chinese, close a door and open a door were represented by exactly the same character.

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?

Sigmund Freud has suggested that we have no early childhood memories at all. 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.