My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again – no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals.

— Joyce Carol Oates

And so it became a household of silence as if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.

— Joyce Carol Oates

A bully is one who forces you to laugh at his jokes, even if they are not jokes. That is how you know he is a bully. A.

— Joyce Carol Oates

He has made a show of being a devoted family man but his life has been carefully arranged so that he spends as little time with his family as possible.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility.

— Joyce Carol Oates

She understood that a woman’s work inside the home is not work but sacred privilege and duty.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don’t know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn’t turn out to be true.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Marx had famously denounced religion as the opiate of the people, now it was Fame that was the opiate of the people;.

— Joyce Carol Oates

He understood the primitive, malevolent spell of The Falls: he was beginning to feel again the sinister attraction he’d felt years ago, as an adolescent, when his emotions were rawer, closer to the surface. Those feelings of dissolution, loss, panic, very like the sensation of falling in love against one’s will. The Falls! You can’t believe it can kill you. When it is pure spirit. After.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The power of a parent to wound, to kill. The power of a parent is terrible.

— Joyce Carol Oates

We know what our punishment is, but what was our sin?

— Joyce Carol Oates

The aim of theater – Aristotle said it first, and Aristotle said it best – is to arouse profound emotion in the spectator and through this arousal to effect a catharsis of the soul. If there’s.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Eventually I gave up making cards. There was such childish hope in these cards, I began to feel pitiful even to myself like a dog whose tail is thump-thump-thumping long after everyone has abandoned him.

— Joyce Carol Oates

You love the life you’ve lived, you’re an American girl. You believe you have chosen it.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I have no talent, no gift. I have the panting ardor of a workhorse. Yet in time even a workhorse wears out.

— Joyce Carol Oates

You are indeed a victim of our culture’s mercenary exploitation of feminine innocence.

— Joyce Carol Oates

My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again – no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.

— Joyce Carol Oates

She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.

— Joyce Carol Oates
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