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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3160ef3 | De alguna manera -habia argumentado Garp- la vida es demasiado. La vida es un folletin melodramatico no apto para menores, John | John Irving | ||
| 9b32675 | Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 9edd761 | During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn't time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, yapping hysterically in her wake, cats scattering wide-eyed and plume-tailed) before the telephone ceased it's querulous ringing--though frequently she was greeted with nothing more than a derisive dial tone, in any case. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| bdf22c0 | Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest. | fairy-tales words suggest end | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 399ed3d | A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| b4c033a | I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, why write at such length about it? I could understand [his] attraction to such a philosophy. Spartan, rigorous. Surpassingly skeptical. Well, good: philosophers should be skeptical. (No one else is: the mass of mankind is credulous as a gigantic infant, willing to suck any teat.) | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 2457013 | She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would become a woman of calm, fatalistic principles, anticipating her life with the equanimity of a weather forecaster. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| e1b8849 | Miles away, factory smokestacks rimmed with flame sent up cast billowing clouds of smoke that gave watercolor look to the sky - orange yellow - a pink cast like dawn - beauty to the gray-layered winter sky like cotton batting laced with flame bleak and radiant simultaneously; and Felix in a rush of gratitude though his heartbeat was still erratic and his hands were sticky with blood could have weepy seeing such beauty in all he'd been a wit.. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 21b0ade | If she lets us down, if she's weird sometimes--just ignore it, and love her. Just love her. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 859c925 | The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained f.. | pollution sun | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| de27b3b | It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| b570907 | For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| fdbd7a0 | In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death--his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently--"shrewdly" and "reasonably"--she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection--a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring.. | grief love widowhood | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 57146be | She was one who wished to believe the human motives precede actions for she was (she had always been) a rational individual yet clearly there were times (was this one of those times?) when actions might precede motives and even render them useless. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 4633f49 | HUSBAND: Is something wrong? BETHIE: Why--why do you ask? HUSBAND: You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you'd forgotten I'm here. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| d11ab75 | The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem." This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course." | humor | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 63588d0 | Men grow cold as girls grow old And we all lose our charms in the end. How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics! | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 51db4b7 | The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 4d81f2a | Messes are made by people who want but don't know what they want, let alone how to get it. | messes | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 3b4937f | I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed: Yes my husband died. Yes I am very sad. Yes you are kind to offer condolences. Now can we change the subject? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 9bbc1c6 | At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron fillings drawn by a magnet. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 64947bf | Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 3a243ba | She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| a00c361 | The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 680b652 | I'd like to be your friend--but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 5d7cd44 | That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can't confront it. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| a9a96b1 | 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 | ||
| de7313d | What is "technique" but the absence of passion?" | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 2f19633 | On the way home Mary Lou said, "Some things are so sad you can't say them." But I pretended not to hear." | pretend sad | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 61f1beb | Sick?--What's sick? Who is 'well'? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent 'well'? | wellness | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| af32b02 | You love the life you've lived because it is yours. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 738c119 | Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that's the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride. | women-s-rights women feminist | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| a58dce1 | For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 1f34838 | But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 273d89b | I have no inner life. I have no 'intimate' life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells. (...) Others' shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They're gone | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 209f476 | My bridal gown. So beautiful in design but it was never sewed. So lovely, ivory lace, ivory silk, sheer lace back, pleated bodice and flared skirt never sewed. My veil, my "train." (So foolish the bridal train, trailing along the ground, on dirty steps. What possible purpose, beautiful and costly dazzling-white silk so quickly spoiled.) The held us captive. My dear mother, and me. And so, when I was married to my husband it seemed to me a.. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| cc3de6a | The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life. | family innocence | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| ea5244d | The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course. | Carol Shields | ||
| b8ee822 | I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little derisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even.. | Carol Shields | ||
| 45ccee3 | it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves. | Carol Shields | ||
| 8aaba14 | It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though.. | Carol Shields | ||
| 61b5518 | He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can't comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement. | Carol Shields | ||
| 4355ab0 | The men, her husband and sons, leave for the quarry at seven o'clock sharp and return at five. What do they imagine she does all day? It makes her shiver to think of it, how not one pair of eyes can see through the roof and walls of her house and regard her as she moves through her dreamlike days, bargaining from minute to minute with indolence, that tempter. | routine-of-daily-life invisibility | Carol Shields | |
| 64c2eec | Nothing matters except for the harvest, the gathering in, the adding up, the bringing together, the whole story, the way it happens and happens and goes on happening. (from "Collision")" | Carol Shields |