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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2b5bc4d | unless it was enough for these worshipers to bask in the knowledge that, though invisible to them and in every way inaccessible to them, the swarthy handsome Ex-Athlete and the beautiful Blond Actress might at that very moment be coupling like Shiva and Shakti, unmaking and making the Universe? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 9f37ecd | In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 81289f4 | Josiah feel that, for a moment, he'd been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too much about too little. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 90b86a2 | Maybe he'd been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it's always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| b4ef96a | I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| b6357f6 | If I could open a vein. Not to inject any shit, I will never weaken like that again, but just to feel the kick of it, the old memory. So this numbness lifts. So I could get back there easier. | self-mutilation sobriety | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 8a1a1f9 | And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self. | soul work | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 16db8ec | Like many shy people, once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand to change the subject, and he had no idea how to engage another person. Like a runaway vehicle, he plunged on, heedless. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 3542b9c | For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| f3c388e | Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I've come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside. Why is it I keep losing my way. The things in the back room taunting me. The views from the windows don't seem to mesh somehow. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 9b0acc1 | Unfamiliar places could be more dangerous than familiar places, unexpectedly. The boy had been discovering that an unfamiliar place was more easily "haunted" than a familiar place simply because there was less there to distract the memory." | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 4cc051a | She 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 lowered hi.. | age-difference joyce-carol-oates | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| f3c8bca | Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 719df84 | NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder's warm mouth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you ad kiss you and kiss him back! The old man's mouth and Katya Spivak's mouth! How could you. | age-difference joyce-carol-oates | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 804512e | The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| b6dce75 | 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 | ||
| 860cc08 | it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 6bbca7c | Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. --Joyce Carol Oates | James Carroll | ||
| 82d5d4a | There's a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It's a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation... I have no idea why | literature | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 00e501b | Jammed together at lunch. Not a drinker, nevertheless I experience a distinct alteration of consciousness in the presence of others--socially, but even in the classroom or seminar--a heightening, livening, intensifying sensation--a kind of euphoria. (Would the drinkers attain the same heights, without drinking? But they never make the experiment.) The process is deceptive: one feels oneself fulfilled, with these shreds and bits of other peo.. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| c86654a | Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| f6344f3 | Words are like wild birds - they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| a47f97c | Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers--their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges--But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight-- | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| bdd6bfc | When there is no longer any point in lying, no one will lie | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| d80f841 | It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn't quite enough. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 9be529d | 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! | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 8c5e0c8 | 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 | ||
| 1a094f6 | I don't want anything from you but the fact of you. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| cf8682f | 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 | ||
| e3efb0d | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 1108b4d | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 1181148 | So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 22beaff | Silence rolled at me, in waves. | evil murder | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 5e5ab6d | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 51f15e9 | Momma used to say, you got to know when to move. More important than knowing when to stay put. | moving moving-on moving-on-and-letting-go not-looking-back | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| f71d7d3 | Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child. | family oates truths | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 14cf3dc | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| ef777d5 | It is required that we must be fiercely beloved by one individual in order to exist: for Sabbath, Haley was that individual. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 75184e5 | 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 | ||
| e7bd034 | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 32eedff | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 12404e5 | And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 3c039bd | 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? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 8de22b4 | 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. | Joyce Carol Oates |