Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

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.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

None of the rest of my life figures here.

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

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

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.