Joyce Oates Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Joyce Oates

Joyce Oates Quotes & Sayings

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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

[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 old
And 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