Joyce Carol Oates quotes - page 3

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. (Joyce Carol Oates)
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The best revenge is living well without you. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
A daydreamer is prepared for most things. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Every scar in my face is worth it. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery. (Joyce Carol Oates)
We 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. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope? View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
If I'm required to identify myself on a form, I write "teacher.” I've been a teacher almost as long as I've been writing. [Pause. ] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes - or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. So it cannot be an accident that I think of you so constantly. (Joyce Carol Oates)
The writer is a "somewhat mystical” - or do I mean "mythical?”. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
When you're 50 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. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Constant interruptions are the destruction of imagination. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates