Joyce Carol Oates > Quotes

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“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

“The best revenge is living well without you. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless

“In love there are two things - bodies and words. ”
― 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, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

“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, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”
― 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, Faithless

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Every scar in my face is worth it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“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, I am No One You Know

“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, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“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, First Love: A Gothic Tale

“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“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

“Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless

“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

“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

“I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie

“Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”
― 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, A Widow's Story

“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

“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde