Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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

“… such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.”

“Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.”

“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”

“In love there are two things - bodies and words.”

“Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.”

“I love insult, it's always honest.”

“I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.”

“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”

“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.”

“I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety.”

“When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.”

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

“Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.”

“We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances.”

“The best revenge is living well without you.”

“The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”

“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.”

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

“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.”

“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.”

“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.”

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”

“Every scar in my face is worth it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”

“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.”

“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”

“Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.”

“My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.”

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”

“Which is why we saymeaning”

“I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.”

“Exotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.”

“I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.”

“Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.”

“The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct”

“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.”

“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.”

“Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.”

“For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.”

“Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

“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?”

“… there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.”

“Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.”

“Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?”

“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.”

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

“In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.”

“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.”

“Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort — these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.”

“[The] third man in the ring makes boxing possible.”

“The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”

“Any number of definitions help to determine who we are. It doesn't hurt to be a woman writer, an American woman writer, American woman writer of the 21st century. I think all these descriptions of us — and they're descriptions and adjectives that pertain to you — none of them diminish you, really. I think that maybe there's a kind of deepening or expansion the more identifications you have.”

“Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

“Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.”

“To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.”

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.”

“When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”