Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

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.

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

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.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?