Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

So you don't believe we have souls I guess? and Legs laughed and said, Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.

while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.

A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on the ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting.

I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others' eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

I feel very transparent in myself. I'm more of an observer. I'm interested in what's going on. I'm not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I'm not with them I don't have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.

We are beasts and this is our consolation.

The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same thing, it's at a distance.

Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?

Only where there is life can there be home.

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.

Starting a novel is like standing in a field and waiting for lightning to strike.

None of the rest of my life figures here.

At least, Mother said, that's the story Aunt Esther tells. What do you mean? I asked. Isn't it true? Stories are never 'true', Mother said. But they may, almost by accident, contain 'truth'. Sometimes.

She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception of her, and love of her.

Marianne laughed. But you can't disappoint me! I don't love you.