Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

In this life of ours we remain directed toward the relative utopia of a better world, and sensibly this can be the only model for our action.

The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead.

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?" "The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Utopia means elsewhere.