Joyce Carol Oates: Trending quotes

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Joyce Carol Oates: 178 quotes3 likes

“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

Source: I Am No One You Know: Stories

“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

Source: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates Blonde

Source: Blonde

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: Invisible Woman: New & Selected Poems, 1970-1982

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

Joyce Carol Oates Blonde

Source: Blonde

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

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

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

Joyce Carol Oates book The Falls

Source: The Falls

“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?”

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: Faithless: Tales of Transgression

“… 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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates Blonde

Source: Blonde

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

Joyce Carol Oates book Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Source: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“I love insult, it's always honest.”

Joyce Carol Oates book Beasts

Source: Beasts

“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

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

Joyce Carol Oates The Gravedigger's Daughter

Source: The Gravedigger's Daughter

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

Joyce Carol Oates book We Were the Mulvaneys

Source: We Were the Mulvaneys

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)