Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

... because the Legs wasnt fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasnt afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think thats something of no consequence but it isnt - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into anothers skin, anothers voice, anothers soul.

The distinction between assistant and intern is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the mans body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Dont dont dont dont leave me. DONT LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face whats called reality with my eyes open.Ive made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

The innocence of such children doesnt answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You cant exercise memory until youve removed yourself from memorys source.

Popular! In America, what else matters?

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.(…)Others’ shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They’re gone

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.

Freaky kids like us can’t ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of “evolutionary development”, my shrink says- “Normal” is just “average”, not cool. My latest diagnosis is “A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out.