Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention

How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray's best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.

I have no talent, no gift. I have the panting ardor of a workhorse. Yet in time even a workhorse wears out.

Remembering backward is the easy thing. If you could remember forward, you could save yourself…

Leander was swaggering and charismatic as a rap star, Maralena gorgeous as the singer whose name I didn't know how to pronounce—Beyoncé.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.

My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.

She understood that a woman's work inside the home is not work but sacred privilege and duty.

It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.

Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely—Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you.

That sensation of things-falling-away. Once the ice begins to crack, it will happen swiftly.   She

Life is the horror, abortion or miscarriage is the redemption. As Sophocles said so beautifully, 'Never to have been born is best, but once you've entered this world, return as quickly as possible to the place you came from.

No matter what she said publicly, the principal of North Hammond High did not believe in rehabilitation for the young. It was too expensive, and its results were unreliable. Recidivism was high. Better to accept that with a few exceptions the young were an accursed generation, frontal lobes stunted from video games, cell phones, TV, sex-gratification by the hour. They had no sense of history and so could have no sense of the future. Equipped with state-of-the-art

These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.

Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn't seen in years turning up looking all wrong.

Love is what can't be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes. Love is what happens when you've been looking another way. Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself it's nothing, a strand of hair, at last you touch it and discover it's an insect—you cast off with a curse.

Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York.

Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

What've I got to do, to prove how much I love you? Blow us all away?

Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;

Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don't know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn't turn out to be true.

You have hardened your heart against your "American cousin." It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suffering makes saints of us, which is a joke. Still I realize you have no time for me in your life now. There is no "purpose" to me. Even