Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

In all marriages there is the imbalance: one who loves more than the other. One who licks wounds in secret, the rust-taste of blood.

There are people, primarily women!--who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth. The integrity of the spirit. He turned the page of his sketch pad and began anew, whistling thinly through his teeth. Thus an icy-cold soul, in the presence of one so blessed, can regain something of his lost self. Sometimes!

You love the life you've lived because it is yours.

Bullshit! Li-ar! Your mother and father are dead like everybody else. Everybody is dead.

I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies.

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.

Maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just just the next just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next maybe all there is is is just is just the next thing Roslyn's words stuck in her head & she could not stop repeating them Maybe all there is is just the next thing like a Hindu mantra & she was a yogin murmuring her secret prayer Maybe all there is just the next thing She thought, That's a comfort!

To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numberous others, will say it for you.

A jury is as bright as the dumbest member of the jury

Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.

The place where you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy's house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?

During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn't time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, yapping hysterically in her wake, cats scattering wide-eyed and plume-tailed) before the telephone ceased it's querulous ringing--though frequently she was greeted with nothing more than a derisive dial tone, in any case.

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself.

The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By

Messes are made by people who want but don't know what they want, let alone how to get it.

for politics is in its essence as Adams had said the 'systematic organiztion of hatred': either you were organized or you were not

Running! If there is any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I cannot think of what it might be.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called? Worse yet: a fear of the known.

I have no inner life. I have no 'intimate' life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells. (…) Others' shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They're gone