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Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Total quotes: 16
“The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, The collector of hearts: new tales of the grotesque
Tagged: Love, Sacrifice, Taken For Granted, Settlement
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art
Tagged: How To Think, Reading, Readers Are Leaders, Best Reading Quotes
“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Wheel of Love and Other Stories
Tagged: Goal Oriented, Dreamer, Positive Trait
“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, A quote by Joyce Carol Oates
Tagged: Hope, Light, Expectations, worst
“Two kinds of grieving: conscious, overt, 'controlled'; unconscious, covert, uncontrolled, roiling & chaotic. We can swim in the waves of the first sort of grief with some measure of control; the second engulfs, obliterates us.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
Tagged: Grieving, Grief, kinds of grief
“Interesting also that Jews wrote so much American popular music & this includes rhythm & blues. Titles you'd never have guessed since they have so passed into popular culture.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
Tagged: Music, popular music, Jews, Popular Culture
“Consider the phenomenon of reading, that most mysterious of acts. It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature
Tagged: Life, Books, Coming To Life, Reading, Pleasure Of Reading, Bookworm, Book Lovers
“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art
Tagged: How To Think, Truth and Evil, Evil Is The Mind
“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art
Tagged: Blood, Life, Generations
“In love there are two things, bodies and words.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Beautiful Days: Stories
Tagged: How To Think, Beautiful Things, Love, Words, enchantment, seduction, Bodies
“There are pleasures in reading so startling, so intense, they shade into pain. The realization that one’s life has been irrevocably altered by . . . can it be mere words? Print on a page? The most life-rending discoveries involve what has in fact never been thought, never given form, until another’s words embody them.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature
Tagged: Life, Books, Coming To Life, Reading, Pleasure Of Reading, Bookworm, Book Lovers
“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde: A Novel
Tagged: Death, Life, The End
“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice by Joyce Carol Oates(1986-10-01)
Tagged: The Person You'll Become, How To Think, Philosophy, self
“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction
Tagged: Art, How To Think, The Person You'll Become, Liveliness, Discomfort, Break Until You Open
“If only that were true. Women are too easily divided: white evangelicals, white college-educated, women of color, immigrant women, lesbian, transgender, ___. GOP seems to know instinctively how to pit one against the other in oldest war strategy: Divide & conquer.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
Tagged: Women, empowering women, Women Empowerment, stop pitting women against each other
“Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
Tagged: Language Is Lust, How To Think
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