Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Running, Thinking, Feet

  "To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet". www.nytimes.com. July 19, 1999.

• We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Memories, Blood, Ancestry

• Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Communication, Writing, Voice

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

• I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Spiritual, Writing, Adventure

• The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Silence, Use

• The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Suicidal, Denial

• Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Language, Paradox, Knows

• Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Experience, Needs, Rising

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

• Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Lying, Language, Cases

  Joyce Carol Oates (1993). “Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang”, E P Dutton

• Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Voice, Challenges

  "A Portrait of the Writer". Interview with Mia Funk, tinhouse.com. February 10, 2015.

• Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Mean, Past

• Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Execution, Language

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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