Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

Confused

Heart

Powerful

… such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can’t see a thing.

Hot

Sun

White

…[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone…Well, that fact alone is staggering.

Consciousness

Facts

People

…failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

Odds

Vegetables

Victory

‘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.

Ideas

Writing

Years

‘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.

Children

Race

War

‘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.

Children

New York

Valentine

“Because there has been no one to stop me” has been one of the principles of my life.

Has Beens

Life

Principles

“Politics” per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Ironic

Moral

Writing

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

Poet

Solitude

Supreme

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Able

Absorbing

Absurd

Acting

Actors

Add

Adults

Advantage

Adventure

Affliction

Age

Airplane

Always Believe

Ambitious

America

Ancestry

Animal

Anxiety

Apology

Army

Art

Artist

Artistic

Ashamed

Atheism

Athlete

Attractive

Austerity

Awards

Axes

Backgrounds

Bakers

Beautiful

Beauty

Bed

Behavior

Being In Love

Belief

Believe

Bereavement

Betrayal

Blessing

Block

Blonde

Blood

Blow

Body

Book

Book Reading

Boxers

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Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

… such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can’t see a thing.

…[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone…Well, that fact alone is staggering.

…failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

“Because there has been no one to stop me” has been one of the principles of my life.

“Politics” per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

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