We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes gone global.

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”

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.

The infliction of economic damage on those profiting from misery is a stated goal.

Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.

I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. I made a mental note to remember this in my own life, but it got lost the way mental notes do.

In everyone’s life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

She reminded me of my own mother, though they weren’t alike in any other way except for the heartbreak.

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

“I think you’re terrific,” he said. “And a very pretty girl. Don’t make me spell it out.” So I’m not sure exactly why we broke up.

For the last seven years, I’ve been a kindergarten teacher at Addison Elementary, which is as close to living with a chimp troop as I’ve been able to get so far.

It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique—our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language—some other species comes along to snatch it away.

Money is the language humans speak, Lowell told me once upon a time, long, long ago. If you want to communicate with humans, then you have to learn to speak it.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone.