Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

. . . 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.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

I love insult, it's always honest.

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

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

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