JCJoyce Carol Oates

135 collected words

Joyce Carol Oates

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

02Undated

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 / quote

03Undated

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

04Undated

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

05Undated

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

06Undated

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

07Undated

Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

08Undated

... because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

09Undated

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

10Undated

The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

11Undated

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 / quote

12Undated

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

13Undated

Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

14Undated

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

15Undated

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

16Undated

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

17Undated

Popular! In America, what else matters?

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

18Undated

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

19Undated

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 / quote

20Undated

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

21Undated

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

22Undated

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

23Undated

I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.(…)Others’ shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They’re gone

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

24Undated

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Joyce Carol Oates / quote