Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Josiah feel that, for a moment, he'd been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too much about too little.

Maybe he'd been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it's always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others.

It is a terrible thing to feel that you might break down, you might utter a confession that could not then be retrieved.

She had paid for these mistakes. (Had she?) But still, you are never fully acquitted of any mistake that involves another, and so the Intern had not been fully acquitted of her mistakes, and her shame of such mistakes.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing - how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles', your 'ideals' - and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

It is required that we must be fiercely beloved by one individual in order to exist: for Sabbath, Haley was that individual.

If I could open a vein. Not to inject any shit, I will never weaken like that again, but just to feel the kick of it, the old memory. So this numbness lifts. So I could get back there easier.

O.K. he's crazy. But he's a saint too. He scares me, I don't like him. He scares me. What the hell-he knows. Yeah? Why? What does he know? --Things most people'd have to die and go to Hell for, to know.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

Laughter too depends upon memory—a memory of previous laughter. Dr.

Out of obscurity I came. To obscurity I can return.

You who are non-believers rely upon us, to confirm your sense of superiority. You need to imagine us as unchanged, unchangeable.

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive. There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many 'culturally-mandated' differences. In First World countries we've evolved beyond mere biology -it isn't the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible.

Like many shy people, once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand to change the subject, and he had no idea how to engage another person. Like a runaway vehicle, he plunged on, heedless.

For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.

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.

Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never "collapse," only just fade gradually away?

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.

This determination to manage—to cope—to do as much unassisted as possible—is the Widow's prerogative. You might argue that it's a sign of her wish to appear to be—which is not the same as being—self-sufficient; or you might argue that it is a symptom of her derangement. But then, in the early minutes/hours/days of Widowhood—what is not, if examined closely, a symptom of derangement?

It is no more malicious, and surely no more unnatural than the act of introducing the male black widow spider to the female of the species. For, what is one doing but hasten the procedure of Nature, and thereby abridging the narrative?

I will be the clinician of my own pathology.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.