Man Crazy Quotes

“Momma used to say, you got to know when to move. More important than knowing when to stay put.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“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

“If I could open a vein. Not to inject any shit, I will never weaken like that again, but just to feel the kick of it, the old memory. So this numbness lifts. So I could get back there easier.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“What've I got to do, to prove how much I love you? Blow us all away?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“Secrets have always been easy for me, it's the opposite of secrets that is hard.”
― 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

“My mind rattled on fast as a machine sometimes, ran its own way without my participation. So I'd know the answer to the algebra problem but not the steps to that answer. Or what a poem like Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" meant but not ho to explain it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“The kind of man, who, every time he steps through a doorway, he's squinting anxious to see if he's welcome. Even when the doorway is his own.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy