Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents.

I lock my door upon myself - a poet had said. I turn my key and there's -- happiness.

You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn't exist.

THANK YOU but please do not write again. And do not call. I have had enough of you.

You love the life you've lived, there is no other. You love the life you've lived, you're an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.

because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts.

I could talk fast -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.

There's a sort of melancholy romance to the experience of being lonesome. I think of reading as a kind of romantic alone activity that you're doing. The image would include being curled up somewhere on a rainy day and you're reading very intensely involved in a world that no one can see because it's inside your head.

All prices of all things—at least, useless beautiful things like rare books—are inherently absurd, rooted in the human imagination and in the all-too-human predilection to desperately want what others value highly, and to scorn what others fail to value.

The aim of theater—Aristotle said it first, and Aristotle said it best—is to arouse profound emotion in the spectator and through this arousal to effect a catharsis of the soul. If there's

Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then. Maybe that's the advantage of dying?

Much of the time he lay part-dressed on his bed, sipping gin, and thinking, and thinking, - though what it was, of which he thought, he seemed not to know.

Della Rae was a pig and she was smashed out of her skull and you didn't want to think about it

They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.

The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves.

The sky resembled shattered oyster shells ribboned with flame in the west, but at ground level, you could almost see (sometimes Mananne had stared out the window of her bedroom, observing) how shadows lifted from the snowy contours of the land, like living things.

There is no religion higher than truth.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

What is destiny—a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." —

so too, her glazed ceramics and her macramé are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.

Gossip - invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate the truth.

I wasn't so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn't so special.