Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

“In love there are two things - bodies and words”

“Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.”

“The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.”

“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once its gone - its value is incontestable”

“When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”

“Nothing is accidental in the universe -- this is one of my Laws of Physics -- except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.”

“When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.”

“The worst cynicism: a belief in luck”

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a strangers life

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

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?