Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

You people who have survived childhood dont remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isnt hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

Running! If theres any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I cant think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” —

(...) I could talk fast -- thats to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, theyd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance Yeah youre my heart too! or I love you or I would die for you, nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.

Dorcas wasnt a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

Its where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.

Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.

The worst cynicism a belief in luck.

When youre fifty you start thinking about things you havent thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity-but actually its about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

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.

Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.

That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.

How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.

She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing.

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.

Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.

How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.

It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.