Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

In the throat, the male is as vulnerable as the female. Once the sharp points of the shears pierce his skin, puncture the artery, there will be no turning back for either of them.

I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.

He thinks: He could give up. He could admit defeat. But he will not admit defeat. He is still alive.

No amount of denials, protestations, or defenses seemed to make any difference, in what is called the 'court' of public opinion.

For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a "sensationalist" rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!

But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a case. God did not think of a man as a case. For a case is to be solved—and a man cannot be solved.

He told Neal he was in poor condition these days but he swam better than Neal, who'd gained ten or fifteen pounds since his marriage, and Enid, falling behind the men, wondered how it felt to have inhabited your body, your very flesh, as a weapon – If you ever got over it, were able to forget. The quick swing of the arms, the power of the fists to hurt – did you ever forget? She wondered did her uncle see other people in opposition to him, as opponents. Or just the men.

I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility.

Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.

On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see the space she'd occupied taken, the emptiness where she had been so readily filled in.

A man is fearful of lonely in a woman

Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death.

If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine's age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn't hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn't be for you.

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.

If this was a flirtation — and it felt like a flirtation — it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?

Loving Felix she'd acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she'd acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, "truth" was common property.

that I—I have not 'heard' . . . What is it?

We know what our punishment is, but what was our sin?

How alone this was going to be.

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

you had to have a deep, mysterious soul to want to destroy yourself. The shallower you are, the safer. Colborne

In slow drowning waves the knowledge washed over Cressida, her professor did not think that she was so special after all. He didn't know her father Zeno. Was that it?

For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel's direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why

and both men listened as if hearing it for the first time, as we so frequently listen, in such circumstances, to tales whose outcomes we already know, or have already been told us by our friends.