Joyce Carol Oates

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

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.

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

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.