Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 2

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!
Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
Joyce Carol Oates
Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.
Joyce Carol Oates
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
Joyce Carol Oates
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
Joyce Carol Oates
I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.
Joyce Carol Oates
Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of “playing”. A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which “neighborhoods” have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of “neighbor childrens” houses or play in “backyards”. In the absence of sidewalks in newer “gated” coummunities, children cannot “walk” to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A “playdate” is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you’ve been awaiting.
Joyce Carol Oates
Freaky kids like us can’t ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of “evolutionary development”, my shrink says- “Normal” is just “average”, not cool. My latest diagnosis is “A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out.
Joyce Carol Oates
For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.(…)Others’ shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They’re gone
Joyce Carol Oates
Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.
Joyce Carol Oates
And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.
Joyce Carol Oates
A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.
Joyce Carol Oates
There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why
Joyce Carol Oates
The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.
Joyce Carol Oates
It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?
Joyce Carol Oates
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
Popular! In America, what else matters?
Joyce Carol Oates
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.
Joyce Carol Oates
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Joyce Carol Oates
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
Joyce Carol Oates
Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.
Joyce Carol Oates
Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.
Joyce Carol Oates
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
Joyce Carol Oates
The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.
Joyce Carol Oates
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
... because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts.
Joyce Carol Oates
Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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 folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
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
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.
Joyce Carol Oates
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
Joyce Carol Oates
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
Joyce Carol Oates
When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.
Joyce Carol Oates
Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life
Joyce Carol Oates
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
. . . 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
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
Joyce Carol Oates
In love there are two things - bodies and words.
Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Joyce Carol Oates