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
In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the deep emotional bond and tension between athletes and their audience in sports.
Joyce Carol Oates expresses that in sports, there exists a unique and profound relationship between the performer, usually the athlete, and the observer, the audience. This connection can evoke intense emotions, such as joy or pain, as spectators relate to the highs and lows experienced by the athletes, creating an often unresolved tension that reflects the stakes involved in competitive sports.
Themes
SportsEmotionConnectionAudienceAthlete
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about teamwork and resilience.
More from Joyce Carol Oates
All quotes βI 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: βExcuse me, it was all a dream,β and by that time I may have found one who will say: βNot at all, it was true, absolutely true.β
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Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.
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The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.
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The more I photograph women, the less it is about transformation. Women are beautiful. All that really matters is enhancing that.
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If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
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