Mudwoman Quotes

“The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“... her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone.
Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe you have chosen it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“The power of a parent to wound, to kill. The power of a parent is terrible.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“…they weren’t far from the small city of Ithaca – which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University…”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“What was most striking about the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington was the aura of confidence it exuded – not merely the figure of the beautifully composed young noblewoman, her slender face seen just slightly in profile so that her elegantly long nose was outlined, but an air of ontological entitlement as different from M.R.’s sense of being in the world as if she and “Jane, Countess of Harrington” were of two distinct species.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“Live alone and you will be thinking non-stop. Your brain will never click off.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“But there is happiness in alone, if you believe that you have chosen it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“It was like a storybook: her life was being written for her. She did not have to write it, only just to read it. The pages were being turned for her, too”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“You don’t have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains. A”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman

“And”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman