Ifs Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

18 Ifs quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates treats “Ifs” like a literary laboratory, mixing dread and desire. Her prose invites you to linger on the tension between what is and what might be.

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Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.

Joyce Carol Oates

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I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

Joyce Carol Oates

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"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

Joyce Carol Oates

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“A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is…

Joyce Carol Oates

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Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Joyce Carol Oates

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You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

Joyce Carol Oates

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It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have…

Joyce Carol Oates

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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

Joyce Carol Oates

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Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

Joyce Carol Oates

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This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning…

Joyce Carol Oates

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If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his…

Joyce Carol Oates

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It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per…

Joyce Carol Oates

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If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this…

Joyce Carol Oates

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The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar…

Joyce Carol Oates

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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

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Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not…

Joyce Carol Oates

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More by Joyce Carol Oates

“A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In”

Joyce Carol Oates

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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

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You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Joyce Carol Oates

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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

Joyce Carol Oates

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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

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At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

Joyce Carol Oates

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A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

Joyce Carol Oates

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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

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The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

Joyce Carol Oates

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“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?”

Joyce Carol Oates

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'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

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Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Joyce Carol Oates

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