In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“It was a very American story, somehow. 'Lost.' Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt.… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
“A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
