Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Life is the horror, abortion or miscarriage is the redemption. As Sophocles said so beautifully, 'Never to have been born is best, but once you've entered this world, return

The fetus wished to live. Stubbornly, sometimes astonishingly-the fetus struggled to live. But the power of its life-or its death-had to reside with the mother. No other alternative was possible.

And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.

If marriage is a masquerade, there is the very real danger that masks may slip. The

I told you, Clara. I don't stay in one place long. And nobody comes with me. I don't marry none if them either. Erase me from your head because you're just not the one kid. Not just you're young which you are, but what I want is a voice. A say a woman talks to me, says things to me I don't know and am astonished to hear and I'll know her as soon as I hear her.

He knows this fact: it was a school bus. That unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine.

?flah olmamak bir yeti?kinin senin davran??lar?na itiraz etmesinden ba?ka nedir ki?

La vida es una cuestión de giros. O al menos así es como los llamo yo. Un giro es una sorpresa. Como si te agarrasen de los hombros por detrás y te obligaran por la fuerza a girar, a volverte

All the rooms of the new house were full to bursting with familiar things made strange and disturbing by their crowdedness and juxtaposition in this new setting, like an unwieldy nightmare into which an entire life has been shuffled out of impersonal malicious glee.

She'd perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar.

For that was mom's trump card: she was the mother, and so possessed a mysterious and unquestioned authority. Dad was the boss, but Mom was the power.

How ironic, it seemed to me, yet, perhaps, how symbolic, that in our age of rapid mass production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies and textbooks! Of

Durante la primera semana en la sala de montaje, a Rebecca le producía náuseas el olor, la rapidez del ritmo, el ruido. Ruido ruido ruido. Con tantos decibelios, el ruido no es sólo sonido, sino algo físico, visceral, como una corriente eléctrica que atraviesa el cuerpo.

Home wasn't home and wasn't very real and that was fine with me. School was even less real. Like a TV program I'd switch on, stare at for a few seconds then switch off. Bullshit.

If you want a life. Different from your parents.

It was a time of sin. It was not a time of innocence. It was a time of physical disgust. For I remember well.

Thank you, Patrick—" but she spoke too softly

There was no purpose to learning useless things, that would only clutter our brains like debris stuffed to overflowing in a trash bin.

Momma was terrified of being really poor, dirt-poor, and men would know, always men can sniff out the degree of your desperation Momma believed, and force you to do things you don't want to do or don't exactly want to do at that time or in that place or in that way. When you have your own money, Momma said, you have power. But you can lose it Goddamned fast.

It had given him a charge of entitlement and invincibility he would draw upon through life, like a limitless bank account.)

Silence has gathered around me like a thick, viscous water filling in a muddy footprint. Early evening, swollen sky like an eye that

No ha sucedido nada que tú no quisieras y pidieras. »Así que cierra el pico. ¿Entendido?» La había zarandeado, con fuerza. Para que dejara de llorar, de sollozar. De atragantarse y vomitar. El hedor que impregnaba su coche le puso furioso.

The curse of the female, to so badly need love.

fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall