Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem. This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.

You spared the adults in your household. You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn't exist.

But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play?

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There's nothing to spare for anyone else.

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.

unless it was enough for these worshipers to bask in the knowledge that, though invisible to them and in every way inaccessible to them, the swarthy handsome Ex-Athlete and the beautiful Blond Actress might at that very moment be coupling like Shiva and Shakti, unmaking and making the Universe?

For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied.

But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.

Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses—one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment.

The Playwright had long been fascinated by the strange mercurial personality of the Actor. What is acting. and why do we respond to great acting as we do? We know that an actor is acting and yet - we wish to forget that an actor is acting, and in the presence of talented actors we quickly do forget. This is a mystery, a riddle. How can we forget the actor acts? Is the actor acting on our behalf? Is the subtext of the actor's acting always and forever our own buried (and denied) acting?

if you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside-taking a chance what you'll learn is worth what it costs.

Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.

Thinking of such things like they'd happened years ago already and not just a few weeks back. For once life begins to accelerate it goes faster and faster.

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.

On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

I could wish that I had recourse to the Prince of Darkness & his quick ways of revenge;

It simply fell from him, like a heavy overcoat he'd shrugged off, no longer needing its warmth or bulk to protect him.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

No one would be able to name what had happened or would wish to name it. Rape was a word that came not be spoken at High Point Farm.

There's something about other people isn't there?--you'd like to know who they are?--you'd like to be them, maybe? People you never saw before and--my voice lifting in excitement, it's so strange how they're different from you, isn't it?--or like if somebody had the power, say somebody said to you, 'would you change places with the next person you see, a stranger just turning a corner,' I'd say, 'Hell yes.

These were no-man's-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the only protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission if you couldn't.