Lovely, Dark, Deep Quotes

“In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Unfamiliar places could be more dangerous than familiar places, unexpectedly. The boy had been discovering that an unfamiliar place was more easily “haunted” than a familiar place simply because there was less there to distract the memory.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“A bully is one who forces you to laugh at his jokes, even if they are not jokes. That is how you know he is a bully. A”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn’t seen in years turning up looking all wrong.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“The wife felt the rebuke. For some rebukes are husbandly.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“she had to think about—whatever it was, she had to think about—something urgent and essential in her own life that was a million pixels swirling in a thunder-cloud about to burst.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“She’d perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“All that crap was like living your life with your face pressed up close against a mirror, you couldn’t see your own face let alone anything surrounding it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Mother’s bread crumb stuffing was particularly delicious this year, made with apples, prunes, chestnuts, thyme, tarragon, fine-cut onions and celery. In the lush salad of many gourmet greens were tiny sections of clementines, dried cranberries, chopped escarole, cherry tomatoes from Mexico. The mashed sweet potatoes were (secretly) laced with marshmallow—one of Mother’s prized family recipes.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“He said oh honey. how long have you known?
Meaning, how long have you been alone, knowing?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“My crappy-kid's life. It was mostly a shitty life wasn't it, OK but I miss it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Nothing is 'mythic,' close up. Nothing is 'mythic' where you live.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“How bizarre it seems to us, Hudson had been looking for a route to the Pacific Ocean, as his predecessor Christopher Columbus had been looking for a route to the East Indies . . . I thought The routes we think we are taking are not the routes we will take. The routes that take us. I”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“You may put this in your interview, Miss Fife, that Robert Frost believes in civilization—which is to say the Caucasian civilization.” “But,”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’—the Americans understand this admonition, deep in their killer-souls.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“The politics of the day infuriated him: even when power lay with the politicians he supported, and the opposition appeared to be failing, so much in the political sphere seemed to him vile, vulgar, meretricious, inane—he threatened that he wouldn’t be voting at all. The”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“If marriage is a masquerade, there is the very real danger that masks may slip. The”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“It was remarkable to Julia—(it did not hurt or offend her, but only amused her)—how Ryan’s family managed to take photographs or videos of themselves that excluded her.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“powerful blow from a practiced boxer can stop an opponent’s heart, it is said. It’s a cruel blow but it can be thrown easily if you have the strength and the skill and the will to do such lethal hurt, and if your opponent has no skills of self-defense. Carefully”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep

“thumb”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep