Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 14

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• She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Broken Heart, Men, Thinking

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• For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Moving, Past, Axes

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• That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Real, Ideas, Ends

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• Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Dumb, Blonde, Problem

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• '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

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• We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Roots, Childhood

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• To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Dream, Writing, People

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• celebrate while you can

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Celebrate

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

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Suicidal, Denial

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• The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Men, Personality, Historical

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• The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  New York, Book, Reviews

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• Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Stories, Embodiment, Precise

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.35, Zondervan

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• There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Sports, Fighting, Thinking

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “On Boxing”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• 'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Years, Ideas

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• As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  War, Princeton University, Eras

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• To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Mean, Doe, Boxers

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.150, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Awards, Might, Negative

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• We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Emotional, Challenges, World

  Joyce Carol Oates (1981). “Contraries”, New York : Oxford University Press

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• Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Food, Cooking, Culinary

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• After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Grandmother, Past, Thinking

  "The grandmother of invention". Interview with Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. September 10, 2007.

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• When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Thoughtful, Preparation

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

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• I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Teaching, Writing, Thinking

  New York Times, 1975.

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• The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Life, Self, Complacency

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• If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Airplane, Phones, Waiting Rooms

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• Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Loyalty, Sports, Boxing

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

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