Want Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

15 Want quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

All Want quotes Joyce Carol Oates’s page

Joyce Carol Oates delves deep into the psyche of longing, offering 15 vivid reflections that echo both personal yearning and broader cultural currents. Her prose invites readers to feel the weight of every unfulfilled wish.

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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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Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Joyce Carol Oates

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All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

Joyce Carol Oates

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“I don't want anything from you but the fact of you.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell…

Joyce Carol Oates

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Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a…

Joyce Carol Oates

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Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's…

Joyce Carol Oates

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“An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.”

Joyce Carol Oates

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The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people,…

Joyce Carol Oates

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I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so…

Joyce Carol Oates

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You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there…

Joyce Carol Oates

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Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it…

Joyce Carol Oates

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My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are…

Joyce Carol Oates

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I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint.…

Joyce Carol Oates

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For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of…

Joyce Carol Oates

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

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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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