Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Daughter, Mother, Children

  "With a Conscience — ‘Our Mother’s Daughters’" by Claudia King, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 25, 2015.

• How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Writing, Together

• 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.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Secret, Tears

  Joyce Carol Oates (2013). “The Accursed: A Novel”, p.26, Harper Collins

• As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Writing, Animal

  "Joyce Carol Oates, writer - portrait of the artist". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. August 14, 2012.

• To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Tradition, Lost

• You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Thinking, Animal

• I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Writing, Voice

  CNN's Book Chat, www.cnn.com.

• Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Lasts, Our Family

• 'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, War, Race

• 'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  New York, Children, Valentine

• Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Book, Space

• I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Children, Powerful

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