Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell your story .

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating .

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible to see your opponent is you …

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

I'm Legs Sadovsky I'm FOXFIRE I don't fuck around with guys.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

There is something female about being dead.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

The distinction between assistant and intern is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not. But of course interns are paid, in experience.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!