Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

He said no break is permanent. Like a bone that heals crooked, still it will heal.

went out for sports as others did, in an affable herd.

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.

grip of Paradox. 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.

What was most striking about the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington was the aura of confidence it exuded – not merely the figure of the beautifully composed young noblewoman, her slender face seen just slightly in profile so that her elegantly long nose was outlined, but an air of ontological entitlement as different from M.R.'s sense of being in the world as if she and "Jane, Countess of Harrington" were of two distinct species.

It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible.

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.

Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals.

My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again—no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.

one kept me informed on Dad's progress. Or lack of progress. Or how serious it all was—is. You certainly didn't, darling." Yet, was this true? Vaguely I seemed to know that my father was not doing well for some time. Driving on our country roads you see the carcasses of animals—raccoons, deer—lying at the roadside, killed

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

they weren't far from the small city of Ithaca – which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University…

The power of a parent to wound, to kill. The power of a parent is terrible.

She could not testify against Zachary Lundt for she could not recall with any degree of accuracy, the sequence of events of the early hours of Sunday February 14, nor even herself during that time. It was like a movie where something has gone wrong with the film, images continue to flutter past, but dim, confused, out of focus.

She wanted a relationship that seemed already mature, if not old and settled, at the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.

All that crap was like living your life with your face pressed up close against a mirror, you couldn't see your own face let alone anything surrounding it.

he'd come to earth. Hard.

and if men looked at her she stiffened feeling her jaws tighten her blood beat with dread and if men did not look at her, if their glances slipped past her as if she were invisible, she felt yet a deeper dread: a conviction of not merely female but human failure.

the United States government was at the mercy of special-interest groups, lobbies like the National Rifle Association and the American Medical Association, the automobile and oil industries, every kind of defense manufacturer, how could democracy be served?

for, though the instinct to fight and to kill is surely qualified by one's personal courage, the instinct to watch others fight and kill is evidently inborn. When the boxing fan shouts, 'Kill him! Kill him!' he is betraying no peculiar pathology or quirk but asserting his common humanity and his kinship, however distant, with the thousands upon thousands of spectators who crowded into the Roman amphitheaters to see gladiators fight to the death.

The curiosity of the book was that, as you held it, and "read" it, you felt an intimate connection with it as with a living thing, which you did not feel with an eBook; as soon as you were finished with the eBook, you stored it, or deleted it; you felt no sentiment or particular ownership.

and out of Death there came this life: hers.

we're sick of ourselves.