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5878017
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Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
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confusing
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f6b8c6e
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Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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cd9f26b
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For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
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happiness
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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5173d65
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but was this funny? was this funny? was this funny? why was this funny? why was Sugar Kane funny? why were men dressed as women funny? why were men made up as women funny? why were men staggering in high heels funny? why was Sugar Kane funny, was Sugar Kane the supreme female impersonator? was this funny? why was this funny? why is female funny? why were people going to laugh at Sugar Kane & fall in love with Sugar Kane? why, another time? ..
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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5b3a8c1
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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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truth
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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47f6dee
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Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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2fb0baa
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There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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bf082e3
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I'm Legs Sadovsky I'm FOXFIRE I don't fuck around with guys.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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2ab46f4
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I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible to see your opponent you ...
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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275aa83
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Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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d243c5d
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Ohhhhh." A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette-crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. T..
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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b1133ce
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Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
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cross
keep-walking
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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22b238c
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When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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71995e7
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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9e6bd3a
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How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell .
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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0138d84
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This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.
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life
nostalgia
technology
telephone
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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035f6fb
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I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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a444a51
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The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
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life
philosophy
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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b571675
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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0a1ff6b
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Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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18a6f3a
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The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not. But of course interns are paid, in experience."
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money
work
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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1840170
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Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8cdd652
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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092c32f
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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8299376
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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efb3f15
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Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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260c63f
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Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8fa7b47
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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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a74e554
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Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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e80efdd
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Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.
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relationships
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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9bc3dc3
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And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs."
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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0a5e7bb
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Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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0357ebb
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And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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c6e8a17
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For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or e..
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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feaeb10
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A female is essentially a cunt, the pure purpose of the female is cunt, but a woman, a wife, is a cunt with a mouth, a man has to reckon with. It's a sobering fact: you start off with a cunt, you wind up with mouth. You wind up with your widow-to-be.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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3c1ae5e
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Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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0b863c6
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Time is the element in which we exist... We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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00e736c
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All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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66ef91e
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So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? 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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flame
soul
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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68d9d72
|
To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f33a504
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Yet there was something gratifyingly real about being called a bitch, a whore, a blond tramp. Where so much was a dreamy haze, anything promising to be real was bracing.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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ec3baf3
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Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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cc32f74
|
I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.
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dreams
love
older
strength
teenagers
young
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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9f80aad
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We are beasts and this is our consolation.
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Joyce Carol Oates |