Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

Because we are linked by blood and blood is memory without language.

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

A hero can be fool, he's still a hero.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.

Because I am in love. Love is a slow bleed.

As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry

Oh, it's a terrible, cruel thing—first you're young, and that takes up such a long time you think it's forever, then suddenly you're not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there's just the one way out.

What is technique but the absence of passion?

Hating The Great Gatsby (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

P.J. said, That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know. Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it. Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.

Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.

whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end—it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion.

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.

Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone. Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe you have chosen it.

And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books. Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on robber barons-he might become one one day!