Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

409. “Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

410. “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

411. “Laughter too depends upon memory – a memory of previous laughter. Dr.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

413. “It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

414. “Love you in that cheerleader’s costume. Last Friday. You didn’t see me I guess. But I was there.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

415. “Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

416. “You who are non-believers rely upon us, to confirm your sense of superiority. You need to imagine us as unchanged, unchangeable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

417. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

418. “As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

419. “But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

420. “I really love to set things in places that are real to me.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

421. “Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

422. “Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

423. “A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

424. “It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

425. “Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

426. “On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see the space she’d occupied taken, the emptiness where she had been so readily filled in.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

427. “These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

428. “I never really knew I wanted to ‘be’ a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

429. “To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully ‘comprehended’ narrative – this is the greatest happiness of the writer’s life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of ’normality.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

430. “An adult man possesses the power to enter your soul. A boy has no power, The power to hurt, maybe, but not the power to enter your soul.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

431. “He thinks: He could give up. He could admit defeat. But he will not admit defeat. He is still alive.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

432. “Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don’t know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn’t turn out to be true.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

433. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

434. “He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

435. “In the throat, the male is as vulnerable as the female. Once the sharp points of the shears pierce his skin, puncture the artery, there will be no turning back for either of them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

436. “Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

437. “Sick? – What’s sick? Who is ‘well’? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent ‘well’?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

438. “The aim of theater – Aristotle said it first, and Aristotle said it best – is to arouse profound emotion in the spectator and through this arousal to effect a catharsis of the soul. If there’s.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

439. “One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

440. “My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

441. “Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

442. “And so it became a household of silence as if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

443. “She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

444. “A bully is one who forces you to laugh at his jokes, even if they are not jokes. That is how you know he is a bully. A.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

445. “How alone this was going to be.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

446. “This was a matter of life and death, and at such extremities all women are sisters.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

447. “He has made a show of being a devoted family man but his life has been carefully arranged so that he spends as little time with his family as possible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

448. “My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again – no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

449. “Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

450. “You are indeed a victim of our culture’s mercenary exploitation of feminine innocence.”

— Joyce Carol Oates