Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

I stand before you, naked as clear water. To be with you, in blood and soul into your fire storm. Even at your darkest when your heart is a Black Forest, I stand with commitment .

Gallagher hablaba muy deprisa. Todo aquello pasaba muy deprisa, desequilibrándolo. Y no había tomado nada más fuerte que cerveza en toda la noche. Lo único que le pasaba era que Hazel Jones se le había subido un poco a la cabeza.

Unlike other sins, however, despair is by tradition the sole sin that cannot be forgiven; it is the conviction that one is damned absolutely, thus a repudiation of the Christian Saviour and a challenge to God's infinite capacity for forgiveness.

You keep asking me that," she said sharply. "No. I don't care to notify anyone. I can't bear a crowd of relatives around me. I threw away that damned corset in a trash can. I won't return to that." There

Corset,' Mrs. Erskine? I don't understand." Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn't comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers.

Fucking macramé knots were maybe harder than they looked.

She was murmuring, "It's all right, dear, it will be all right, I love you." For that was the one thing she knew, amid all that she didn't.

Poetry is what frightens. It is rare, and worth waiting for.

Foolish woman, don't despair. My justice is My mercy. 5

Fascinating to Hannah, who has constructed her life as a means of exploiting her own passivity, to be forced to see how free she is: how alert, excited, aroused and aware and in a state of anticipation she really is, and not "fated.

always, you want to impress them: men of authority)

It was Corinne's secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her by God. I must become the mother deserving of such a daughter—is that it?

At bedtime the demon brother sank into sleep with the abruptness of a rock sinking into dark water, come to rest in the soft dark mud below.

Es corriente entre las víctimas de violación, sea hombre o mujer, evitar los espejos y la confrontación directa con todas las imágenes de "sí mismas". Como si donde había habido una persona, ahora no hubiera nadie.»

Burnaby wasn't a Christian but he behaved like a Christian is supposed to behave which made Colborne, a Christian, uncomfortable.

I'm not bitter for they are telling me I am HISTORY You wouldn't be bitter if you are HISTORY any of you A MAN would not be bitter if entering History! nor should a WOMAN Break my heart, better than break my nose (you bastards) Revenge is SWEET (& I need to acquire that taste)

Yet I remember little. Or nothing. A chloroformed handkerchief, perhaps; a stinging & burning sensation afterward, when required to make water—(as Nanny called it); ah, is it not distasteful, ugly—& too trifling to be recalled.)

hovering in the air like a drunken moth.

The murderer is not protected! He is vulnerable. TO

Marriage, family. What else is there? You had to grow up. You had to accept it.

But oh!—this so queer sensation between my eyes, in my lower forehead—is it the third eye, of enlightenment? Opening, at last?

The kind of man, who, every time he steps through a doorway, he's squinting anxious to see if he's welcome. Even when the doorway is his own.

Mom was furious at the way people abandoned their pets in the country—"As if animals aren't human, too.

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city)