Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

Only where there is life can there be home.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you cant escape. Life was easier then. You just didnt pick up the phone.

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and theres no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, youre no longer their child.

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.

These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.

There are some secrets so toxic you can’t share. Especially if you love who it is you’d have to share with.

I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I’m not with them I don’t have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem. This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. (Family)

A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.

-So you dont believe we have souls I guess? and Legs laughed and said, Yeah probably we do but whys that mean were gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isnt it, while its burning?-even if theres a time it goes out?

A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting.

Boxing has become Americas tragic theater.

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.