Children Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

“She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“It was Corinne’s secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred…

— Joyce Carol Oates

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention”

— Joyce Carol Oates

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it…

— Joyce Carol Oates

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into…

— Joyce Carol Oates

We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to…

— Joyce Carol Oates

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the…

— Joyce Carol Oates

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people.…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my…

— Joyce Carol Oates

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it…

— Joyce Carol Oates

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and…

— Joyce Carol Oates

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child,…

— Joyce Carol Oates