You Must Remember This Quotes

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

“Miles away, factory smokestacks rimmed with flame sent up cast billowing clouds of smoke that gave watercolor look to the sky – orange yellow – a pink cast like dawn – beauty to the gray-layered winter sky like cotton batting laced with flame bleak and radiant simultaneously; and Felix in a rush of gratitude though his heartbeat was still erratic and his hands were sticky with blood could have weepy seeing such beauty in all he’d been a witness to most of his life, thinking Oh Jesus he was going to miss these opaque surfaces of a world he knew so well, it was like his skill turned inside out, all he loved out there, he was missing them even now when he was still here, still alive.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“...she'd studied herself in mirrors half her life in despair and hope knowing it's power you need, oh, Jesus, power; if you're beautiful you'll have it over other people, over men, you'll be loved, desired, never have to die.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“Loving Felix she’d acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she’d acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, “truth” was common property.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“The hat-check girl wore her hair in a schoolgirl pageboy so you were meant to think of Dorothy Collins – all innocence, wide-eyed and breathless – but this was mock-innocent and she knew her business, a narrow waist and shapely hips, lovely full breasts thrust out and upward inside the black satin bodice probably by one of those wired contraptions Howard Hughes had allegedly invented, the strapless brassiere a marvel of American know-how defying gravity, invented for that busty film actress Jane Russell who was probably one of his mistresses. A thing like that must hurt as much as the high-heeled pointy-toed shoes, Lyle Stevick though, worse than the corsets poor Hannah wore, sighing and lacing herself up as if the flesh was something you had to carry around with you, not exactly you but your burden and responsibility.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine’s age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn’t hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn’t be for you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see the space she’d occupied taken, the emptiness where she had been so readily filled in.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“He told Neal he was in poor condition these days but he swam better than Neal, who’d gained ten or fifteen pounds since his marriage, and Enid, falling behind the men, wondered how it felt to have inhabited your body, your very flesh, as a weapon – If you ever got over it, were able to forget. The quick swing of the arms, the power of the fists to hurt – did you ever forget?
She wondered did her uncle see other people in opposition to him, as opponents. Or just the men.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This

“The secret is to scale one's ambitions precisely to fit one's talent," Mr Lesnovich told Enid. His manner as always was grave, vaguely censorious. "That is the key to happiness.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This