"What you call your personality, you know? --it's……" — Joyce Carol Oates
"What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been."
—
Joyce Carol Oates
★
★
★
★
★
0.0 avg (0 ratings)
312 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates has 312 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
-
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves…
-
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last…
-
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up.…
-
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…
-
Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut…
-
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…
-
Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death…
-
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.
See all 312 quotes by Joyce Carol Oates »
More Actual Quotes
This quote is filed under Actual Quotes,
one of 1,266 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
-
The fatigue produced on the muscles of the human frame does not altogether depend on the actual force employed in…
— Charles Babbage
-
Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat,…
— Michele Bachmann
-
The Canadian run can be no different, at least in terms of actual running.
— Dennis Banks
-
Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.
— Dave Barry
-
I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.
— Lynda Barry
-
Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their…
— Jeff Bezos
-
It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.
— Ambrose Bierce
-
Sure, I suffered a lot. But it's not like the end of the world and it's not who I am.…
— Ben Affleck
-
I've thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was…
— Elayne Boosler
-
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what…
— Elizabeth Bowen
-
Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations…
— William J. Brennan
-
You don't want flame to hit your food. Flame is bad. Flame does nasty things to food. It makes soot…
— Alton Brown
See all 1,266 Actual Quotes »