Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The desire to be a writer often emerges from a lifelong practice of writing rather than a formal decision.
Joyce Carol Oates reflects on her journey as a writer, highlighting how her passion for writing developed naturally from an early age. She suggests that while she may not have explicitly sought to become a writer, her consistent engagement with the craft laid the groundwork for her eventual recognition of it as a significant aspiration in her twenties.
Themes
WritingPassionLiteratureJourneySelf-Discovery
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, as a prompt to discuss the importance of childhood influences on our current work.
More from Joyce Carol Oates
All quotes →I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
. . . 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.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
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The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.
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