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Truth Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

15 Truth quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

All Truth quotes Joyce Carol Oates’s page

Oates brings a novelist’s sensitivity to the notion of truth, and these fifteen snippets capture her ability to turn ordinary moments into profound revelations. You’ll sense her characteristic blend of psychological insight and lyrical precision.

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I love insult, it's always honest.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

Joyce Carol Oates

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“I’d rather be truth-telling and I hope always to be without hypocrisy.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

Joyce Carol Oates

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“Gossip - invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate the truth.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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“Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as…

Joyce Carol Oates

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“P.J. said, "That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know." "Right! So We're…

Joyce Carol Oates

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And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has…

Joyce Carol Oates

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. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction,…

Joyce Carol Oates

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“At least," Mother said, "that's the story Aunt Esther tells." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Isn't it true?" "Stories are never…

Joyce Carol Oates

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At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something…

Joyce Carol Oates

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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

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you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined…

Joyce Carol Oates

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“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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And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power…

Joyce Carol Oates

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I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects…

Joyce Carol Oates

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... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

Joyce Carol Oates

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