Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Reading Quotes

52. “Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

53. “I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

54. “Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

55. “There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

56. “I love insult, it’s always honest.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

57. “There is something female about being dead.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

59. “I’m drawn to failure. I feel that I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

60. “Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

61. “Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

62. “In love there are two things – bodies and words.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

63. “Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

64. “Every scar in my face is worth it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

66. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

67. “Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

68. “To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

69. “There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won’t receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

70. “Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

71. “Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

72. “From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there’s a place to be located on a map that’s destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn’t too late. If no one stops you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

73. “The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won’t last; nothing can guarantee it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

74. “I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

75. “In a family, what isn’t spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

76. “The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

77. “That’s how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

78. “It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

79. “As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my ‘farm chores’ – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

80. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

81. “Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

82. “The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

83. “To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you’re not aware of that when you’re a child, the whole tradition is lost.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

84. “The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

85. “Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

87. “I’m nobody’s daughter now. I’m through with that.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

88. “My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

89. “A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

90. “After my parents passed away – in 2000 and 2003 – I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

91. “I’ve always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel ‘Black Water,’ I provide a voice for someone who has died and can’t speak for herself.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

92. “It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

93. “He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn’t matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

94. “Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought ‘The Fable’ was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked ‘Tender Is the Night,’ an experimental novel.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

95. “There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

96. “For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

97. “My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

98. “Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

99. “It feels good, honey, but it isn’t love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

100. “One of life’s minor satisfactions is forgetting.”

— Joyce Carol Oates