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2881b83
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I never change, I simply become more myself.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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ece605a
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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.
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time
finality
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8ab40a4
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Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f3a4657
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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
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reason
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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e26d05d
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A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
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inspirational
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8e966d9
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He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
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women
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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410f585
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There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it."
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grief
loss
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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e44ee47
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Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed."
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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7f36aad
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I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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2cb4fbf
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If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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6d3c8b2
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She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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0942239
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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c787de9
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Death is just the last scene of the last act.
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death
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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115f566
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My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f81ffec
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Which is why we say meaning
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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6798027
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How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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97183e1
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Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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55b309e
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It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f75a143
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Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive."
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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dcfd40a
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I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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761db6d
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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt."
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writing
complexity
art
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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4205e72
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I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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501e742
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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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a1a06b9
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Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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cd4a0ba
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You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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6b28a49
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Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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7a4a4bb
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Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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206fb7b
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We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred;
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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ff0d4c8
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you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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248db99
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For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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c381dd7
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such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
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mom
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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81204a6
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Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery."
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writing
on-fiction
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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1b7d89f
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Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bo..
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sex
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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930dace
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Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise you will like.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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57e65b8
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f58476e
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Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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2261cfa
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Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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7053c16
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The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
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motherhood
parenting
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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38f716a
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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?
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irony
hurt
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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419775b
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I love insult, it's always honest.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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436ac24
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In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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4f0eaae
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I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8a3a9e8
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Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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50c1999
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Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
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Joyce Carol Oates |