Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Let them write angry letters to the Government- they haven't been loved enough, there has been some crime

For it seemed (though why it seemed so, no one knew) that everything began on that night. And, once begun, it could not be stopped.

The hard part of humanity is history. All that's been done to human beings by other human beings. In the Rocky River Nature Preserve you didn't have to think of such things.

She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.

A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy. Josiah

Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and "brooding" windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As

A bully is one who forces you to laugh at his jokes, even if they are not jokes. That is how you know he is a bully. A

There is comfort in such accumulations, layers of lives, of years. Gardening tools, wheelbarrow, arousal cans, old bicycles, recycling bins, battered trash cans, cardboard boxes stacked in a corner, cracked clay pots, exiled kitchenware & furniture, antique television, dog food bowls. You could do an inventory of a household by all that has been worn out or excluded, exiled from it. You could do an inventory of a life.

To seek out, to study, to immerse oneself in, surround oneself with, beauty; to be conscious of one's dependence upon those who create it or, like the performing musician, re-create it. Very little matters apart from this.

You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.

Se você não quer correr o risco. Talvez seja melhor não jogar nada.

He has made a show of being a devoted family man but his life has been carefully arranged so that he spends as little time with his family as possible.

A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

Secrets have always been easy for me, it's the opposite of secrets that is hard.

Love is not enough to keep us from harm.

Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be—to become—normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.

Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative -- this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality.

Not hearing impaired but just not hearing which is a way of not caring.)

In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term—peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.

Popular! In America, what else matters?

As our great American philosopher William James has said, an individual has as many selves as there are individuals whom he knows. There isn't the slightest hypocrisy in this, but only pragmatic ethics. For not all persons are worthy of our acquaintance, and not all persons require equal time from us. You save your most valuable 'personality' for the most valuable persons you know.

A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.