Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder's warm mouth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you ad kiss you and kiss him back! The old man's mouth and Katya Spivak's mouth! How could you.

She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.

Fortunately, the clinical diagnosis "ADD" didn't exist when I was a child, and restless children were not medicated, or I might have been narcotized at an early age, and my brain affected. (No one can tell me that dosing young children with such powerful drugs will have no long-term effect upon them.)

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to "outlive" them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.

First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don't know it at the time.

The things that link us deepest, we can't feel. Except if they're taken from us.

So we invent reasons for the unreasonable. We are rationalists of the irrational. It

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—

When there is no longer any point in lying, no one will lie

It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn't quite enough.

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!

Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.

She will speculate that she didn't fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband "alive" in her memory—elusive, teasing.

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives.

Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. "Pa?

Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.

it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.

So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell.

Like the silence that surrounds the tolling of the bell allows you to hear the bell.

A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.

In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that's a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the train slows for a station, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss like the sigh of a great ugly beast, and passengers lurch off, and new passengers lurch on, and I lift my eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you?

The Bog Kingdom. Bidding him enter! Ah, enter! There, all wishes are fulfilled. The more forbidden, the more delicious.