Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

He'd never risk his life if he could avoid it. "I'd rather live, thank you." In

En una familia, lo que no se dice es lo que se espera oír. Pero el ruido que hace una familia es para que no se oiga.

One thing it was not: love at first sight. He didn't believe in such. He wasn't a believer in romance, sentimental coincidences, "meanings" snatched out of the air. He certainly didn't believe in destiny, he was a gambler by nature and you know that destiny is just chance you try to manipulate for your own profit. Yet

It's fine, I have it. It's fine.

The proposition is: Flesh has memory. The proposition is: Flesh has memory but is perpetually innocent. Even in ripening, even in rot.

Mrs. Erskine struck him as fierce and plain and haughty as one of those straight-backed red-haired girl-women in certain of the watercolors of Winslow Homer.

I choose to believe Herb Yellin when he says I am a major writer now for one can choose to believe any number of things, encouraging, discouraging, good, bad, neutral, far-fetched, probable, amusing, tragic; etc. and I choose quite openly, quite deliberately, and I hope with a certain modesty, to believe the things, the phrases, the judgments of strangers, that will put me in the most productive mood...that will make me, simply, happier.

was in love with Briscoe

the mirror above the bureau—a flushed blurred face. I had learned to look quickly away from that face for so often I hated what I saw.

I told you Clara, I don't stay in one place long. And nobody comes with me. I don't marry none of them either. Erase me from your head because you're just not the one kid. Not just that you're young, which you are, but what I want is a voice. A way 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.

Near the point of impact, time accelerates to the speed of light.

and much more interesting.

Of all Biblical figures, surely Judas is the most misunderstood, as he is the most condemned!"—so Winslow believed.

When her lover had loved her she'd been beautiful. When she'd been beautiful her lover had lover her. It was a simple proposition, a seemingly tautological proposition, yet it resisted full comprehension.

Asusta, corta la respiración, cada vez con más fuerza. El corazón se acelera para mantener el paso. El cerebro echa a correr, pero sin ir a ningún sitio. No es posible pensar de manera coherente. Los pensamientos se derraman como las cuentas de una sarta rota...

For it had always seemed evident to him, Jesus adored his faithless Judas above the other disciples.

Politics, the negotiating of power. Eros, the negotiating of power.

It was a principle of hers that you must never say anything about another person you would not say in that person's presence.

You can be on easy terms with such a man, you can see that he likes you, then by mistake you say the wrong word or make the wrong assumption and something shuts down in his face. Like an iron grating over a pawnshop window on a rundown street in Atlantic City. That abrupt.

My mind rattled on fast as a machine sometimes, ran its own way without my participation. So I'd know the answer to the algebra problem but not the steps to that answer. Or what a poem like Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken meant but not ho to explain it.

Though words sometimes puzzled Alma, she never looked up any word in any dictionary; a word was like a pebble to be turned briefly in the hand, and tossed away, with no expectation that it would be encountered again.

Why had she hesitated to say they were lost, why hadn't she told him to turn the car around, to reverse their course, oh please!—but she had not dared offend him. The black water was her fault, she knew. You just don't want to offend them. Even the nice ones.

And her father's personal odor, of which she would no more speak than she would have uttered an obscenity in his presence.

perfection of the life or of the work