01c. 1938 ADWhen you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity-but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
02c. 1938 ADWe inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
03c. 1938 ADHospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
04c. 1938 ADThat I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
05c. 1938 ADHow strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
06c. 1938 ADShe will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
07c. 1938 ADStill, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
08c. 1938 ADNor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
09c. 1938 ADHow 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1938 ADIt is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
11c. 1938 ADLike editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
12c. 1938 ADLoving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
13c. 1938 ADThe minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
14c. 1938 ADThe coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
15c. 1938 ADThe gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
16c. 1938 ADFor writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
17c. 1938 ADIt is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
18c. 1938 ADIt may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
19c. 1938 ADNowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
20c. 1938 ADI'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
21c. 1938 ADMy theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
22c. 1938 ADI 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 / quote ↗
23c. 1938 ADI'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
24c. 1938 ADBoxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
