Jco Quotes

“You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don't know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn't turn out to be true.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“Momma was terrified of being really poor, dirt-poor, and men would know, always men can sniff out the degree of your desperation Momma believed, and force you to do things you don't want to do or don't exactly want to do at that time or in that place or in that way. When you have your own money, Momma said, you have power. But you can lose it Goddamned fast.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy