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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5620914 | Loving Felix she'd acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she'd acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, "truth" was common property." | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 7ddb425 | In slow drowning waves the knowledge washed over Cressida, her professor did not think that she was so special after all. He didn't know her father Zeno. Was that it? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 7c03652 | And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 5f68398 | Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely--Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| c0892f6 | Civilization is faces, "appearances": when these collapse, civilization collapses as well." | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| a87a88b | Much of the time he lay part-dressed on his bed, sipping gin, and thinking, and thinking, - though what it was, of which he thought, he seemed not to know. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 6e8a7c1 | Love you in that cheerleader's costume. Last Friday. You didn't see me I guess. But I was there. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 3fbb632 | is joy in life, a terrible joy. There is joy for the taking if you are not afraid. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 692a570 | Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 4e46616 | For in America this season is decreed "family season". (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don't have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year's season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year's season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is.. | fiction literature | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| aa51218 | Freaky kids like us can't ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of "evolutionary development", my shrink says- "Normal" is just "average", not cool. My latest diagnosis is "A.P.M", Acute Premature Melancholia", usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too. You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like.. | fiction literature | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 599204d | What was most striking about the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington was the aura of confidence it exuded - not merely the figure of the beautifully composed young noblewoman, her slender face seen just slightly in profile so that her elegantly long nose was outlined, but an air of ontological entitlement as different from M.R.'s sense of being in the world as if she and "Jane, Countess of Harrington" were of two distinct species." | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 9056146 | Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of "playing". A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which "neighborhoods" have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of "neighbor childrens" houses or play in "backyards". In the absence of sidewalks in newer "gated" coummunities, children cannot "walk.. | fiction literature mystery novels | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| d669ecb | For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| bbe92d5 | The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism! | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 0ffb3ac | and both men listened as if hearing it for the first time, as we so frequently listen, in such circumstances, to tales whose outcomes we already know, or have already been told us by our friends. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| fdf30ed | How exhausted I am suddenly!--though this has been Ray's best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling--almost--exhilarated. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| aa0a1c4 | My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author." | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 55c240a | It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| ef22656 | That sensation of things-falling-away. Once the ice begins to crack, it will happen swiftly. She | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| a43ad7c | Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn't seen in years turning up looking all wrong. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 34d7386 | Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 51d54a6 | You have hardened your heart against your "American cousin." It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suffering makes saints of us, which is a joke. Still I realize you have no time for me in your life now. There is no "purpose" to me. Even" | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 53dd3d5 | because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts. | feminism feminist women women-s-rights | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 211a22d | Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 6cf893a | For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| d4b6db4 | 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. | principles words | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| b0e6f1a | Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 4e0d4d8 | Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 19ef1fd | Popular! In America, what else matters? | literature popularity | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| af520ea | A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know. | foxfire moon | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| e6e329b | A man is fearful of lonely in a woman | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| c60dfa9 | that I--I have not 'heard' . . . What is it? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 5becb23 | How alone this was going to be. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| ff8f04f | But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 99207f6 | The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you're safe. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 2b466da | Where the veil broke, you could see silvery clouds on which tall angels might stand. Not cute little Christmas angels, but high, stern angels in white robes, whose faces were sad and serious from being near God all day and hearing His decisions about the world. | god-s-decisions | Cynthia Voigt | |
| 1acfddb | Mina thought to herself, watching, her momma was the kind of woman she wanted to be, wherever else she got to in her life. | Cynthia Voigt | ||
| 623b224 | Your grandmother thought--no, she believed, it was like a faith for her. She believed it the way some people believe in God or science. She believed that it was the rules that made her life so easy. She thought life was about the rules people make for it, as if life was some kind of a board game and if you had a little luck, and you kept to the rules, you'd end up winning. Or maybe she thought it was like a game of solitaire and once the ca.. | cards life-philosophy luck rules | Cynthia Voigt | |
| 4a7b154 | He held the whip that and made those marks, and drawn that blood, and he was ashamed. He held the whip that could make more marks on the flesh of Nikol's back. While Nikol begged. | Cynthia Voigt | ||
| 3502c8d | You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs ... They thought that just because they were smashing eggs they must be making an omelette | Cynthia Voigt | ||
| 666ae3d | Evil would be done, that was the nature of the world; that was bearable if good could also be done. | Cynthia Voigt | ||
| c22b15a | When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south," Gran told Birle. "Not empty," Granda corrected her. "The forest is never empty." | Cynthia Voigt | ||
| 64bcfc0 | Is there such a thing?' Birle asked. He looked thoughtfully at her, but not as if he saw her. 'Men have dreamed of it, although none has ever held it in his hand, not to my knowledge. I cannot say that there is such a thing, no. But equally I cannot say there is not. Why should a man be able to dream of it if it cannot be? If it is so impossible, then what put's it into a man's mind? Greed puts many things into men's mind, and fear does too.. | Cynthia Voigt |