Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Joyce Carol Oates quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty
— Joyce Carol Oates
No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.
— Joyce Carol Oates
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
— Joyce Carol Oates
The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same thing, it's at a distance.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Everything is entirely in Nature, and Nature is entire in everything. She has her center in every brute. - SCHOPENHAUER The
— Joyce Carol Oates
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
— Joyce Carol Oates
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
— Joyce Carol Oates
The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall,
— Joyce Carol Oates
The murderer is not protected! He is vulnerable. TO
— Joyce Carol Oates
I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
— Joyce Carol Oates
No amount of denials, protestations, or defenses seemed to make any difference, in what is called the 'court' of public opinion.
— Joyce Carol Oates
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
— Joyce Carol Oates
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
— Joyce Carol Oates
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
— Joyce Carol Oates
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Faith' and 'science' inhabit totally different spheres, and do not overlap, even to share the same vocabulary.
— Joyce Carol Oates
A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.
— Joyce Carol Oates
HUSBAND: Is something wrong?BETHIE: Why
why do you ask?
HUSBAND: You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you'd forgotten I'm here. — Joyce Carol Oates
Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
— Joyce Carol Oates
It might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
— Joyce Carol Oates
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
— Joyce Carol Oates
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.
— Joyce Carol Oates
It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
— Joyce Carol Oates
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
There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with.
— Joyce Carol Oates
![Joyce Carol Oates Quotes By Joyce Carol Oates: [Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/joyce-carol-oates-quotes-by-joyce-carol-oates-292223.jpg "Joyce Carol Oates Quotes By Joyce Carol Oates: [Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.")
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
— Joyce Carol Oates
and much more interesting.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth ...
— Joyce Carol Oates
For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.
— Joyce Carol Oates
And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible.
— Joyce Carol Oates
How exhausted I am suddenly! - though this has been Ray's best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling - almost - exhilarated.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Poetry is what frightens. It is rare, and worth waiting for.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
— Joyce Carol Oates
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Corset,' Mrs. Erskine? I don't understand." Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn't comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.
— Joyce Carol Oates
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?
— Joyce Carol Oates
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
— Joyce Carol Oates
How happy she was, how elated!
— Joyce Carol Oates
The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.
— Joyce Carol Oates
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
The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Men grow cold as girls grow oldAnd we all lose our charms in the end.
How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics! — Joyce Carol Oates
Let them write angry letters to the Government-they haven't been loved enough, there has been some crime — Joyce Carol Oates
A bully is one who forces you to laugh at his jokes, even if they are not jokes. That is how you know he is a bully. A
— Joyce Carol Oates
Messes are made by people who want but don't know what they want, let alone how to get it.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life
— Joyce Carol Oates
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
Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.
— Joyce Carol Oates
As long as you're in motion, your perspective is obscured. Only when you reach the summit and turn to look back, can you be at peace.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.
— Joyce Carol Oates
It had given him a charge of entitlement and invincibility he would draw upon through life, like a limitless bank account.)
— Joyce Carol Oates
The things that link us deepest, we can't feel.Except if they're taken from us. — Joyce Carol Oates
Words are like wild birds - they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.
— Joyce Carol Oates
It is the most horrific thought - my husband died among strangers.
— Joyce Carol Oates
"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.
— Joyce Carol Oates
For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.
— Joyce Carol Oates
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
— Joyce Carol Oates
People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Our house is made of glass ... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Love you in that cheerleader's costume. Last Friday. You didn't see me I guess. But I was there.
— Joyce Carol Oates
On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.
— Joyce Carol Oates
For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?
— Joyce Carol Oates
Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Exotic: meaning you're "desired."For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive. — Joyce Carol Oates
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I really love to set things in places that are real to me.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Politics, the negotiating of power. Eros, the negotiating of power.
— Joyce Carol Oates
All actors are whores.They want only one thing: to seduce you. — Joyce Carol Oates
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
— Joyce Carol Oates
Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
— Joyce Carol Oates
He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!
— Joyce Carol Oates
Acting is the loneliest profession I know.
— Joyce Carol Oates