Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

54. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

66. “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

67. “I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

72. “There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

73. “I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

74. “Death is just the last scene of the last act.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

78. “When poets – write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

79. “I’m sure all that you’ve heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

80. “Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

81. “What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She’d become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

82. “How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called “sentences.” And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

83. “Most people who are writers go through periods when they can’t write.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

84. “To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

85. “A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

86. “If you’re living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It’s in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

88. “When I’m really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it’s as though I’m writing a letter to someone I’m desperately in love with.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

91. “In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term – peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

93. “I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

94. “Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

99. “Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

100. “Love is an indescribable sensation – perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.”

— Joyce Carol Oates