Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.

Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of “playing”. A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which “neighborhoods” have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of “neighbor childrens” houses or play in “backyards”. In the absence of sidewalks in newer “gated” coummunities, children cannot “walk” to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A “playdate” is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you’ve been awaiting.

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if were exhausted, its impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that were dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.

Keeing busy is the remedy for all the ills in America. Its also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you dont know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what youve been told, what the words suggest.

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You dont know - cant know - that it is the first of a series of wrongful events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!

Memory blurs, thats the point. If memory didnt blur you wouldnt have the fools courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’.

...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isnt a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didnt belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didnt belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesnt want to put restraints on robber barons-he might become one one day!

Silence rolled at me, in

FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER! By the time the kidnapped turquoise-and-chrome car overturns--turns and turns and turns!--in a snow-drifted field north of Tydemans Corners Legs Sadovsky will have driven eleven miles from Eddys Smoke Shop on Fairfax Avenue, six wild miles with the Highway Patrol cop in pursuit bearing up swiftly when the highway is clear and the girls are hysterical with excitement squealing and clutching one another thrown from side to side as Legs grimaces sighting the bridge ahead, its one of those old-fashioned nightmare bridges with a steep narrow ramp, narrow floor made of planks but theres no time for hesitation Legs isnt going to use the brakes, shes shrewd, reasoning too that the cop will have to slow down, the fuckerll be cautious thus shell have several seconds advantage wont she?--several seconds can make quite a difference in a contest like this so the Buicks rushing up the ramp, onto the bridge, the front wheels strike and spin and seem at first to be lifting in decorous surprise Oh! oh but astonishingly the car holds, its a heavy machine of power that seems almost intelligent until flying off the bridge hitting a patch of slick part-melted ice the car swerves, now the rear wheels appear to be lifting, theres a moment when all effort ceases, all gravity ceases, the Buick a vessel of screams as it lifts, floats, its being flung into space how weightless! Maddys eyes are open now, shell remember all her life this Now, now how without consequence! as the car hits the earth again, yet rebounds as if still weightless, turning, spinning, a machine bearing flesh, bones, girls breaths plunging and sliding and rolling and skittering like a giant hard-shelled insect on its back, now righting itself again, now again on its back, crunching hard, snow shooting through the broken windows and the roof collapsing inward as if crushed by a giant hand upside-down and the motor still gunning as if its frantic to escape, theyre buried in a cocoon of bluish white and theres a sound of whimpering, panting,sobbing, a dogs puppyish yipping and a strong smell of urine and Legs is crying breathlessly half in anger half in exultation, caught there behind the wheel unable to turn, to look around, to see, Nobodys dead--right? Nobodys dead.

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or fearlessly- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.

On the way home Mary Lou said, Some things are so sad you cant say them. But I pretended not to hear.

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no morality. For whats morality but a leash around the neck? A noose? Whats morality but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?