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Top Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Browse top 196 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Joyce Carol Oates.

Favorite Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

1. "The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
2. "The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
3. "But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
4. "Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
5. "Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
6. "Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?" ~ Joyce Carol Oates
7. "A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
8. "...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
9. "Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
10. "I love insult, it's always honest." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
11. "Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
12. "When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
13. "For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?" ~ Joyce Carol Oates
14. "Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
15. "So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
16. "I'm not bitter for they are telling me I am HISTORYYou wouldn't be bitter if you are HISTORY any of youA MAN would not be bitter if entering History! nor should a WOMANBreak my heart, better than break my nose (you bastards)Revenge is SWEET (& I need to acquire that taste)" ~ Joyce Carol Oates
17. "I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
18. "I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
19. "Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
20. "My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
21. "Every scar in my face is worth it." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
22. "It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
23. "Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
24. "Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise you will like." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
25. "Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
26. "For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
27. "Darwin- I think the theory is: out of 'chaos' arises something that resembles 'design'. But it's all random." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
28. "This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
29. "And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
30. "When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
31. "Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
32. "Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
33. "Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
34. "As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
35. "To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
36. "A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
37. "In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
38. "As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry" ~ Joyce Carol Oates
39. "To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
40. "Close up she saw that Molina's eyes were beautiful and dark thik eye lashed the way Lisette's mother tried to make hers with a mascara brush. The skin beneath Molina's eyes were soft and bruised looking and on her throat were tiny dark moles. It did not seem right that a woman like Molina, who you could tell was a mother-her body was a mother's body for sure, wide hips-could be a cop;it did not seem right that this person was carrying a gun, in a holster attached to leather belt, and that she could use it, if she wanted to." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
41. "Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life" ~ Joyce Carol Oates
42. "Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?" ~ Joyce Carol Oates
43. "I am snatching at things to prove my life." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
44. "Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
45. "The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible' in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility' - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive' or ‘unattractive', while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible'." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
46. "Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
47. "The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
48. "We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
49. "I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
50. "Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance." ~ Joyce Carol Oates
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Today's Quote

I am the O'Malley and I will not take your shit."
Author: Caris O'Malley

What Did Joyce Carol Oates Talk About?

Thin
Wit
Here
Ear
Hen
Self
Use
Con
She
Act
Ten
King
Ring
Per
Sin
Lit
Son
Thou
Might
Low
Lie
Los
Hey
Cause
Ally
Able
Pen
Woman
Tan
Win
Ears
End
Ways
Sing
Die
Seem
Though
Yes
Eye
Ours
Does
Less
Box
Hear
Cat
Light
Fat
Tea
Dead
Sit

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