Joyce Carol Oates quotes - page 2

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! - that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms - nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss? (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. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing - for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
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. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter. (Joyce Carol Oates)
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty." View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
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. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
It feels good, honey, but it isn't love. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish. (Joyce Carol Oates)
Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates