Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

There's a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It's a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

It was a very American story, somehow. 'Lost.' Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.

FOR HYSTERICAL MAIDENS I WOULD PRESCRIBE MARRIAGE, FOR THEY ARE CURED BY PREGNANCY. —Hippocrates

Silence rolled at me, in waves. They are all dead, and you are free. And you are blameless.

As long as you're in motion, your perspective is obscured. Only when you reach the summit and turn to look back, can you be at peace.

While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy's considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.

Our lives are Mobius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.

There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.

Eventually I gave up making cards. There was such childish hope in these cards, I began to feel pitiful even to myself like a dog whose tail is thump-thump-thumping long after everyone has abandoned him.

Marx had famously denounced religion as the opiate of the people, now it was Fame that was the opiate of the people;

Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

She was one who wished to believe the human motives precede actions for she was (she had always been) a rational individual yet clearly there were times (was this one of those times?) when actions might precede motives and even render them useless.

You are indeed a victim of our culture's mercenary exploitation of feminine innocence.

Without anyone to talk to, a person is not quite real. Sounds are very important - we are like bats tapping at each other with sounds, making sure there is someone there, groping along. Sounds. Syllables. The beat of music. It is all a curious flowing, which you can hear only when you are silent yourself.

We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal.

Love you in that cheerleader's costume. Last Friday. You didn't see me I guess. But I was there.

And so it became a household of silence as if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.

is joy in life, a terrible joy. There is joy for the taking if you are not afraid.

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.

Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.

Clearly, boxing's very image is repulsive to many people because it cannot be assimilated into what we wish to know about civilized man. In a technological society possessed of incalculably refined methods of mass destruction (consider how many times over the United States and the Soviet Union have vaporized each other in fantasy) boxing's display of direct unmitigated and seemingly natural aggression is too explicit to be tolerated.

You love the life you've lived, you're an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.