Joyce Carol Oates: Quotes about life

Joyce Carol Oates is American author. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Joyce Carol Oates: 178   quotes 2   likes

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: Faithless

Life

“The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Life , Art

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.

Life , Art , Thinking

“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”

Joyce Carol Oates book After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

Source: After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

Life , People

“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

Life , Truth

“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

Life , Time

“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)

Life , Box

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

Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times (27 July 1980)

Life , People , Books , Reality