Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

352. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

353. “She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

354. “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

355. “Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

356. “The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you’re safe.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

357. “Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you’d never think it could be merely rock like the earth’s common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own...”

— Joyce Carol Oates

358. “It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing – how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principles,’ your ‘ideals’ – and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

359. “Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

360. “You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn’t exist.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

361. “It was a very American story, somehow. ‘Lost.’ Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

362. “While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

363. “Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don’t want them. What I want is a voice.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

364. “But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a case. God did not think of a man as a case. For a case is to be solved – and a man cannot be solved.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

365. “To claim – to claim repeatedly – that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numberous others, will say it for you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

366. “It’s one of those secrets that’s embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

367. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

368. “When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

369. “On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

370. “And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

371. “It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

372. “Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

373. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

374. “Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

375. “Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. “Pa?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

376. “A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino’s, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

377. “And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

378. “I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

379. “People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

380. “I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It’s always something very specific.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

381. “The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one’s generosity? Why regret one’s impulsiveness, one’s misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you’d written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don’t cherish us as we’d cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

382. “They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

383. “An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

384. “Maybe he’d been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it’s always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

385. “Popular! In America, what else matters?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

386. “Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be – to become – normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

387. “If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine’s age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn’t hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn’t be for you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

388. “I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

389. “Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

390. “I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others’ eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

391. “For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

392. “The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

393. “For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

394. “We are the species that clamors to be lied to.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

395. “I learned you don’t discover the evidence of any cause in its result.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

396. “Recently she had been going through a period of adolescent melancholia, often talking with her mother, a nurse, about death. She would, she hoped, be some day reincarnated as a cat.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

397. “How lawyers make work for one another! You’re all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

398. “In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

399. “But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

400. “I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates