Joyce Carol Oates > Quotes

“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

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― 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

“In love there are two things - bodies and words. ”
― 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

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”
― 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, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.”
― 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, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”
― 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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless

“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, Faithless

“Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless

“It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Small Avalanches and Other Stories

“Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Little Bird of Heaven

“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

“The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise you will like.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Little Bird of Heaven

“You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I am No One You Know

“I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Exotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves,
unable to see that here, now,
this very moment is sacred;
but once it’s gone –
its value is incontestable.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Rape

“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

“What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I am No One You Know

“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, Faithless: Tales of Transgression

“Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless

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

“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

“My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself

“Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde