The Accursed Quotes

“I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“... while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“... the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books."
"Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“I could wish that I had recourse to the Prince of Darkness & his quick ways of revenge;”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“So we invent reasons for the unreasonable. We are rationalists of the irrational. It”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“The Bog Kingdom. Bidding him enter! Ah, enter! There, all wishes are fulfilled. The more forbidden, the more delicious.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“Josiah feel that, for a moment, he’d been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too much about too little.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and “brooding” windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy. Josiah”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel’s direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“VERY ODD, HOWEVER, Annabel was beginning to feel, how the stranger continued to hold the hand-sickle, at his side; now he’d turned to her, seeing her, yet without an air of surprise, as if he’d known she was there, observing him; he smiled, in a rapt sort of silence, as no gentleman would ever do, in fact; as if he and Annabel Slade had met by chance in a public place, or in some dimension in which the sexes might “meet” impersonally, like animals, with no names, no families—no identities. In that instant, Annabel felt both chilled and flushed with warmth; and somewhat faint; and had to resist the impulse to hide her (burning) face in the little bouquet of flowers she had picked, that the bold stranger would not stare so directly upon her with his penetrating gaze. A”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“that I—I have not ‘heard’ . . . What is it?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“went out for sports as others did, in an affable herd.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a “sensationalist” rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“grip of Paradox. A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed

“A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia

“It seemed that the two were "running"—leaping and bounding as if weightless—in close pursuit of their prey, which the Count had sighted: a youth of about fourteen, with a very dark skin, like ebony; a startled white smile, or grimace; and eyes protuberant as the eyes of a panicked pony. This, on lower Witherspoon Street, several blocks below the cemetery; on a night of intermittent moonlight and shadows; like big cats they stole upon the youth, soundless; like cats, cuffing and pummeling and clawing him, as he cried out in terror. The Count drove the boy at Mandy, who drove him back to the Count, with the most deft motions of her hands; then, with a muffled cry, the Count fell upon their prey, sinking his teeth deep in the ebony-dark throat, and deeper yet. The Count reached out to seize his mistress's wild windblown hair, and to tug her to him, that she too might embrace the now paralyzed youth, and suffer the paroxysm of gratified desire.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed: A Gothic Supernatural Horror in Woodrow Wilson's Cursed Princeton – Vampires and Dark Academia