Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Selected Early Stories Quotes

“Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Selected Early Stories

“Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Selected Early Stories

“I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Where are You Going, Where Have You Been? [casebook]

“Recently she had been going through a period of adolescent melancholia, often talking with her mother, a nurse, about death. She would, she hoped, be some day reincarnated as a cat.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Where are You Going, Where Have You Been? [casebook]

“She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Selected Early Stories