The collection / 135 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1938 AD

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

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02c. 1938 AD

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

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03c. 1938 AD

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

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

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04c. 1938 AD

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

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05c. 1938 AD

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

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

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06c. 1938 AD

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

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07c. 1938 AD

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

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

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08c. 1938 AD

... 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

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09c. 1938 AD

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

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10c. 1938 AD

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

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11c. 1938 AD

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

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12c. 1938 AD

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

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13c. 1938 AD

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

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14c. 1938 AD

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

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

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15c. 1938 AD

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

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16c. 1938 AD

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

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17c. 1938 AD

Popular! In America, what else matters?

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

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18c. 1938 AD

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

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19c. 1938 AD

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

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20c. 1938 AD

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

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21c. 1938 AD

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

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22c. 1938 AD

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

Joyce Carol Oates / quote

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23c. 1938 AD

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

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24c. 1938 AD

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

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