Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 2

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?

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

Just to pose certain questions is, I guess, to show your hope they can be answered.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Can compromise be an art? Yes-but a minor art.

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

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

In all marriages there is the imbalance: one who loves more than the other. One who licks wounds in secret, the rust-taste of blood.

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.

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

The innocence of such children doesn't 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.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love-the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

If she lets us down, if she’s weird sometimes - just ignore it, and love her. Just love her.

I’d like to be your friend - but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.

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

-So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.