Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Tu castigo si eres mujer. Que no te amen lo suficiente.

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out." ? Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys

loving him more than her life, her life she'd have tossed into the air confident he'd catch it, yes and

No noose is good noose'—as the condemned man said on the scaffold.

yearning self? Yearning to purify himself at last, after

In her behavior Mrs. S——was youthful and loud-talking which made us uneasy, for children are not comfortable when adults behave as if they are not adults. Often it seemed that Mrs. S——was winking at us as if there was some joke between her and us, unexplained.

You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness.

Because nothing between human beings isn't uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

Rogar a Dios que sea bueno contigo porque lo que te aterroriza es que Dios no sea bueno contigo.

And that smell of masculine indignation, rage like something singed.

How happy she was, how elated!

Once you own things you have to be afraid of them. Of losing them.

Midway through the class Erma handed back the students' self-portraits and asked for volunteers to read their work aloud, which induced a flurry of excitement and drama.

A life consists of many facts, implacable facts, you do not want to know.

If some men supposed themselves free it was only because they did not understand that they were imprisoned—bars could be made of any shadowy substance, any dreamy loss of light.

In love there are two things—bodies and words.

For Iris has learned that to experience a thing is not to know it, or even to have the power to remember it coherently.

the terrible intimacy of pregnancy

A career is not a life. Only a family is a life.

How bizarre it seems to us, Hudson had been looking for a route to the Pacific Ocean, as his predecessor Christopher Columbus had been looking for a route to the East Indies . . . I thought The routes we think we are taking are not the routes we will take. The routes that take us. I

She is frightened but she is thrilled. She is thrilled but she is frightened.

The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

You do know, don't you, Allen, that God is a bookseller? He publishes one book-the text of suffering - over and over again. He disguises it between new boards, in different shapes and sizes, prints on varying papers, in many fonts, adds prefaces and postscripts to deceive the buyer, but it's always the same book.