“I lock my door upon myself - a poet had said. I turn my key and there's -- happiness.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my… — 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
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
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain? — 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… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone. Alone, alone! But… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas… — 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
The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“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
