Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

a mother's crying, stifled, soundless, secret so as not to disturb. If you cried so others could hear you were crying to be heard but a mother's crying was just the opposite, crying not to be heard.

Sleeping with another person is a responsibility, a trust: you must not intrude into the other's dreaming.

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.

En el Exilio te agarras a lo que tienes, a lo que no te han quitado (todavía).

Of course, a literary work is a kind of nest: an elaborately and painstakingly woven nest of words incorporating chunks and fragments of the writer's life in an imagined structure, as a bird's nest incorporates all manner of items from the world outside our windows, ingeniously woven together in an original design.

and halfway wondered if anhedonia might not be the most intelligent response to God's fallen world. "Here, after all, is Hell," the detective idly mused. "Nor are we likely to be out of it, save through death.

the swans are beautiful like figures in a dream, that seem to represent something for which there are no adequate words.

She realizes: the man's power is to intimidate, to make you ashamed. But your power over him is the power of laughter.

Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. If you grew up in the Niagara region, you knew. Adolescence was the dangerous time. Most Niagara natives kept their distance from The Falls, so they were immune. But if you drifted too near, even out of intellectual curiosity, you were in danger: beginning to think thoughts unnatural to your personality as if the thunderous waters were thinking for you, depriving you of your will. Clyde

If Marianne had noticed.

When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it's naive to expect the flow to reverse.

Being lonely was a female sickness for which the cure was the tattoo freak & the tattoo freak was also the sickness.

He was sentimental about women. It infuriated him that any man, let alone a minister, could behave so selfishly on his honeymoon.

Where there is passion there is argument.

Our lives are Möbius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring. In

In marriage as in tennis, one player is inevitably superior to the other.

I am not at ease in a kitchen, which, I tend to think, is a "woman's place"—(I do not identify with "woman" if I can help it: "woman" is likely to be a sap);

But how is it justice, God? Why do I deserve this?" She waited. God declined to reply. How

as men were smudged and stained by crying.

She was standing with her thin arms lifted in a pose of crucifixion as the white satin gown with its myriad pearl buttons, tucks and pleats and ingenious lace trim, was fitted onto her like an exquisite straitjacket. Mrs. Littrell had insisted upon the corset, Ariah could scarcely breathe. I take thee Gilbert. My lawfully wedded husband. A sneeze would have shattered the corset, and the wedding. At police headquarters, the bride of the "fallen" man was clearly to blame. Ariah

A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In

You don't understand! Gilbert turned his back on me, but he wouldn't have turned his back on God." Ariah

It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.

Dr. Oakley was shaking his head, visibly nervous, frowning at the report in his fingers. He was a man whose courtly, warmly gracious manner could sometimes shade into awkwardness. He was an old-style general practitioner of an era that preceded what he perceived as trendy psychologies, therapies.