Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you.

We are born as who we are, the gender thing is something that is imposed on you.

As a kid, I wanted to be a boy because I equated that with strength. There's a problem with that. It's only growing into my own womanhood that I realize how warped that is that I was attributing strength to male qualities.

My mom had started to go to work when I was nine or ten, so I was aware of women trying to find their own identities by working. But I was still influenced by men to such an extreme. I wanted to play their games and wanted to compete in their world and be like them.

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

I would recommend it to everybody, every now and again you just put a dress on, see what it feels like, because it's, its interesting. A whole complex series of thoughts and feelings assail you as you look at yourself.

I grew up in a very patriarchal family. And I believe that I like being a woman. I act behaving like a woman.

I've definitely met some people that cultivated a masculinity that they taught themselves. I don't know how they figured out how to do it, but I couldn't.

On ne na:"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn't mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.

I think the biggest shift for me is - this is going to sound like a wanky actor, but - getting in touch with, and learning to not just appreciate, but actually really enjoy being a woman. Because for so long I was a jock, and I was an athlete, and I was a tomboy, and people would joke about like, fancy dress, you should go as a girl.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed toward that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.

I don't know anything except being female, so I don't know the opposite of it.

After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.

I am constantly trying to reflect the way women are treated. It's hard to interpret that in clothes or in a show but there's always an underlying, sinister side to women's sexuality in my work because of the way I have seen women treated in my life. Where I come from, a woman met a man, had babies, moved to Dagenham, two up two down, made the dinner, went to bed. That was my image of women and I didn't want that. I wanted to get that out of my head.

In the '50s you had to wear pink ribbons if you were a girl, and you were supposed to become a hairdresser or a secretary. I couldn't stomach it. Later on, when I fell in love with my husband and had children, that's when my mother's earthiness or sense of femaleness kicked in.

Before tomorrow, make a list of your traits. Make YOUR list - who you are and why. Then ask yourself this question: where did it come from? Are you the way you are because it is what you want... or what they want? Are you a product of your imagination or someone else's? Think about it.

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search--for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.

The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

Men are taught to apologise for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.