Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

315 quotes in 3485 categories

• The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
• The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing…
• I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming…
• The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
• Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid…
• Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the…
• The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
• The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.
• Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
• Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I…
• Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
• We are the species that clamors to be lied to.
• The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
• I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come…
• 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 just…
• Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
• In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved
• Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
• Tragedy is the highest form of art.
• A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

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