A Garden of Earthly Delights Quotes

“Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. “Pa?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“It did happen that you were punished sooner or later. It happened whether you did anything wrong or not.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“Having so much, knowing so much wore out your soul, for you knew that you could lose it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“If you want a life. Different from your parents.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“Five children now, and one of them a seven-month baby. What you call an infant. Nursing, and fretting and crying half through the night. Driving their neighbors crazy, and Carleton couldn't blame them for banging the walls. With each baby Pearl was getting stranger, sometimes Carleton swore her eyes hadn't any pupils, all iris, like a cat's. All she seemed to like were the new babies, but only when she nursed them. Humming and rocking and stroking the baby's soft thin-haired head in a way that repelled Carleton, like something sick and disgusting he couldn't give a name to.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“Once you own things you have to be afraid of them. Of losing them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“Of course, a literary work is a kind of nest: an elaborately and painstakingly woven nest of words incorporating chunks and fragments of the writer's life in an imagined structure, as a bird's nest incorporates all manner of items from the world outside our windows, ingeniously woven together in an original design.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“young girl Revere had brought home”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights