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bdd6bfc
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When there is no longer any point in lying, no one will lie
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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d80f841
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It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn't quite enough.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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9be529d
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It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed--to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8c5e0c8
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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1a094f6
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I don't want anything from you but the fact of you.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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cf8682f
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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."
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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e3efb0d
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Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely--perhaps never--furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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1108b4d
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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1181148
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So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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22beaff
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Silence rolled at me, in waves.
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murder
evil
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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5e5ab6d
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As long as you're in motion, your perspective is obscured. Only when you reach the summit and turn to look back, can you be at peace.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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51f15e9
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Momma used to say, you got to know when to move. More important than knowing when to stay put.
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moving-on
not-looking-back
moving-on-and-letting-go
moving
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f71d7d3
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Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
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family
oates
truths
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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14cf3dc
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She had paid for these mistakes. (Had she?) But still, you are never fully acquitted of any mistake that involves another, and so the Intern had not been fully acquitted of her mistakes, and her shame of such mistakes.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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ef777d5
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It is required that we must be fiercely beloved by one individual in order to exist: for Sabbath, Haley was that individual.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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75184e5
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You who are non-believers rely upon us, to confirm your sense of superiority. You need to imagine us as unchanged, unchangeable.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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e7bd034
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Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive. There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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32eedff
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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12404e5
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And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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3c039bd
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In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that's a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the train slows for a station, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss like the sigh of a great ugly beast, and passengers lurch off, and new passengers lurch on, and I lift my eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you?
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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8de22b4
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Without anyone to talk to, a person is not quite real. Sounds are very important - we are like bats tapping at each other with sounds, making sure there is someone there, groping along. Sounds. Syllables. The beat of music. It is all a curious flowing, which you can hear only when you are silent yourself.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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9957a6c
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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47183b6
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We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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05bf047
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of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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c38dd18
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I could wish that I had recourse to the Prince of Darkness & his quick ways of revenge;
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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6ea7b39
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A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons--Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy. Josiah
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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2724af4
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Se voce nao quer correr o risco. Talvez seja melhor nao jogar nada.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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5ab0c9e
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I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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f1dfa2e
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She could feel these hands tremble, and she could feel Mr. Kidder's excitement. How eager she was to be gone from this room. Her heart was beating in mild revulsion from the man's touch, but Katya forced herself to remain still, politely unresisting. In Mr. Kidder's eyes, which brimmed with moisture, Katya saw such tenderness for her, such desire, or love, she felt that her throat might close, she might begin to cry. Gravely Mr. Kidder lowe..
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age-difference
joyce-carol-oates
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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64acf07
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Leander was swaggering and charismatic as a rap star, Maralena gorgeous as the singer whose name I didn't know how to pronounce--Beyonce.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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32c08a0
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Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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7ad9c49
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so too, her glazed ceramics and her macrame are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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a9f01ab
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Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and "brooding" windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As" --
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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637d83f
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A familiar story, Marya instructs herself--a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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231d38b
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The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.
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literature
novella
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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43c32ec
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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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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2cc5c68
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If this was a flirtation -- and it felt like a flirtation -- it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?
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age-difference
joyce-carol-oates
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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d242721
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I will be the clinician of my own pathology.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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ea73191
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you had to have a deep, mysterious soul to want to destroy yourself. The shallower you are, the safer. Colborne
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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e970bbe
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If [the heavyweights] become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust...Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like..
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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aed008c
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VERY ODD, HOWEVER, Annabel was beginning to feel, how the stranger continued to hold the hand-sickle, at his side; now he'd turned to her, seeing her, yet without an air of surprise, as if he'd known she was there, observing him; he smiled, in a rapt sort of silence, as no gentleman would ever do, in fact; as if he and Annabel Slade had met by chance in a public place, or in some dimension in which the sexes might "meet" impersonally, like ..
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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a24f80c
|
For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel's direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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fbaebea
|
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.
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Joyce Carol Oates |
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9a9b252
|
Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;
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Joyce Carol Oates |