Middle Age Quotes

“Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance: When a Charismatic Hero Dies, a Small Town Uncovers His Flawed Humanity

“Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I've come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside.
Why is it I keep losing my way. The things in the back room taunting me. The views from the windows don't seem to mesh somehow.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance: When a Charismatic Hero Dies, a Small Town Uncovers His Flawed Humanity

“...Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance: When a Charismatic Hero Dies, a Small Town Uncovers His Flawed Humanity

“In love there are two things—bodies and words.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance: When a Charismatic Hero Dies, a Small Town Uncovers His Flawed Humanity