Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 9

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• Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Interesting, Sometimes, Reviews

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Space, Juncture, Standing

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• I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Daughter

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• There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Taken, Realizing, Hours

  Joyce Carol Oates (2008). “Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway”, Ecco

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• The quiet people just do their work.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Quiet People, People, Routine

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• Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  House, Community, Culture

  Interview with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. May 8, 2013.

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• My students often say, "My roommate read this story and really liked it", and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, "well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something."

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Love You, Teaching, People

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

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• When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reality, People

  New York Times, July 27, 1980.

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• Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Distance, Oxygen, Parent

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• And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Thinking, Trying, Way

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• Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Girl, Two, White

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• The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Men, Boxing, Rings

  "On Boxing". Book by Joyce Carol Oates, 1987.

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• Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Ideas, Numbers

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• How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Spring, Being In Love, Mysterious

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• What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Men, Stronger, Madness

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• No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Stories, Storytelling

  "Joyce Carol Oates: 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. February 25, 2012.

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• Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Pain, Winning, Boxing

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “On Boxing”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Girl, Daddy, Choices

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• '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

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• Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Passion, Ashamed, Subjects

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.23, Zondervan

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• 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

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• The despairing soul is a rebel.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Soul, Rebel, Rebellion

  Joyce Carol Oates (1999). “Where I've Been, and where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose”, Plume Books

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• There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Beauty, Weight, Kind

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• It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Secret, Students, Embarrassing

  Joyce Carol Oates' address to graduating class at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, May 28, 2006.

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• To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Done, Might, Innocent

  Joyce Carol Oates (2010). “Little Bird of Heaven”, p.23, HarperCollins UK

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