Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Secrets! As a child you come to see the world's crisscrossed with them like electromagnetic waves, maybe even held together by them. But you can't know. Not, as kids say, for sure. And if you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside—taking a chance what you'll learn is worth what it costs.

The left strap was torn from the pleated bodice but did not appear to be otherwise damaged, it should be easy to mend. More difficult would be the long jagged tear in the skirt, upward from the hem on a bias. She could hear still the shriek of the delicate fabric as if her very nerves had been ripped out of her flesh.

The scattered bloodstains across the front of the dress were light as freckles, but the darker stains on the back, a half dozen stains as long as six or seven inches, had turned a sour yellowish shade, unmistakable. Like the stained crotches of certain of her panties which Marianne scrubbed, scrubbed by hand to rid them of traces of menstrual blood before drying them in her closet and dropping them into the laundry chute.

How tired Dabney is, of genteel conversation; of his mother, whose love for him is stifling as damp cotton batting, and her tedious relatives of whom not one is younger than she, and no one is near the age of her restless son.

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

From time to time somewhere in the house the lonely Siamese cat erupted in a high-pitched, piteous yowl, a cry of utter desolation and misery that chilled my blood, as if I had been torturing her, and was to blame for her suffering.

The man is too narcissistic, too shallow and cowardly for suicide. Days

Corinne was confusedly aware of something dashing in front of the station wagon at the crest of a hill. A gray-funny shape blurred with spee and before Corinne could think to brake the vehicle's front wheels, ran over it with a thud, and beside her, Marianne began to scream and scream.

I could see how, the more time you spent in the man's presence, the less silly he seemed. There is a kind of erosion, a wearing away, in one's perception of foolishness, if the object of derision gives no sign that he acknowledges it.

La desesperación es una enfermedad del espíritu, del yo, y puede adoptar, en consecuencia, tres formas: la desesperación de no ser consciente de tener un yo; la desesperación de no querer ser uno mismo; la desesperación de querer ser uno mismo.   SØREN KIERKEGAARD, La enfermedad mortal     La muerte de una hermosa niña de

After the front wheels of Corinne's station wagon ran over the creature, there was nothing for her to do except make an emergency U-turn on the highway and speed back into Mt. Ephraim, to get medical help for Marianne, who was sobbing convulsively: choking, breathless, hysterical, hyperventilating!

Mom was stubborn, and eloquent.

Marianne was not the type to speak of such things, she'd worry she was betraying the boy's confidence, but if the boy was pursuing her, so much more doggedly than other boys had pursued her. Marianne would be terribly distressed. Nothing worried her more than the possibility she'd hurt someone's feelings.

A wise administrator never admits to having enemies, and a yet wiser administrator never has enemies.

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

Because Judson Andrew Mulvaney was the last born of the Mulvaney children. Because I was Babyface, Dimple, Ranger, I was the last to know everything: good news or bad, and probably there were lots of things I never knew at all.

Like a memory of having been poisoned by something you'd eaten, barely managed to survive—and yet here is the food again, and you are hungry.

Why is the misery of a child so hilarious to other children?

Labor was the right word for it. You surely do labor. Like pushing a wagon loaded with cement blocks uphill, three wheels stuck. Grunting, sweating, straining like a sow to give birth as it's called.

Nothing is more lonely than fucking 'good works.

Thank god for beauty, a balm to the soul.

Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

She had never been drunk before, but believed that that was what had happened to her. She'd been drinking something made of orange juice and she'd been warned, but had not listened or could not remember having listened, and could not remember who'd warned her. She did not wish to name any names and to involve her friends or anyone for no one was to blame except possibly herself.

Always, you maintain your dignity.