from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

“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. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

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“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”

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“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.” 

― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves