I Lock My Door Upon Myself Quotes

“My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself

“And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself

“Because we are linked by blood and blood is memory without language.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself

“The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's business after all but her own, my uncle's face darkening with blood as he spoke, my mother's fair fine skin pink as if smarting yet still I persisted, for I thought it such a horror, such a grief, yes and an embarrassment too, I said, "She's made a prison of this house, it's like she's a nun, it must be to punish herself," and my mother said quietly, angrily, "You don't know - what do you know! People do what they want to do.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself

“She was my mother's mother but not my grandmother in any terms I can comprehend and if her mad blood courses through me now I have no knowledge of it and am innocent of it.

"Calla": given that name by her own mother as soon as she was born; in January 1890; as if her mother had known in the agony of childbirth she could not live, thus wanted to give her infant daughter, her first- and last-born, a legacy suggestive of the grave.

So that even as a child my mother's mother was forced to consider her name specially ordained, fated: a white beyond white: the sweet waxy glaze of calla lillies, massed funeral flowers.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself