Joyce Carol Oates: Trending quotes

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Joyce Carol Oates: 178 quotes3 likes

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

Joyce Carol Oates

On the introduction of referees in the late 19th century
On Boxing (1987)

“The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Do What You Will (1970), pt. 2, ch. 15

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Tavis Smiley interview (2005)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

“Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

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

Joyce Carol Oates

"The Calendar's New Clothes," New York Times (30 December 1999)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Tavis Smiley interview (2005)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (19 August 1986)

“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 Summing Up: Meredith Dawe," Do What You Will (1970)

“Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.”

Joyce Carol Oates

As quoted in "Master Race," Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition (1985), edited by William Phillips

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

Joyce Carol Oates

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (19 August 1986)

“The writer is a “somewhat mystical” — or do I mean “mythical?””

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

“The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sums of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can’t be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual — that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked — is surely at the core of our culture’s fascination with pornography.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

“There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?" Mademoiselle (February 1970)

“At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

“Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don’t give up, don’t be discouraged, don’t pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

“Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)