Joyce Carol Oates: Likeness

Joyce Carol Oates is American author. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Joyce Carol Oates: 178 quotes3 likes

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: Faithless

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates book Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Source: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: I Am No One You Know: Stories

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates book First Love: A Gothic Tale

Source: First Love: A Gothic Tale

“… 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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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 book You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13