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Joyce Carol Oates
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“Like hungry flies, his thoughts buzzed around inside his head.”
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“He did not like children; he instinctively feared their honesty.”
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“Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.”
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“The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.”
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“This is a work of history in fictional form — that is, in personal perspective, which is the only kind of history that exists.”
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“Loneliness is dangerous. It's bad for you to be alone, to be lonely, because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to self.”
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“... he had made the transition from 'promising' to 'established' without anything in between, like most middle-aged critics of prominence.”
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“... a daydreamer is prepared for most things ...”
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“There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty”
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“The skin is the most impermeable barrier of the body. It is always thirsty. Its thirst is insatiable. Human thirsts are satisfied from time to time, but the thirst of the human skin is never satisfied so long as it lives.”
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“Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off a light.”
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“In love there are two things — bodies and words.”
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“After love a formal feeling comes.”
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“The brain is a muscle / of busy hills, the struggle / of unthought things with things / eternally thought.”
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“... like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth ...”
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“The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.”
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“The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”
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“Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.”
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“One must be pitiless about this matter of 'mood.' In a sense the writing will create the mood. ... I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing-card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes ... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.”
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“... doesn't everyone feel rather exiled? ... the mere passage of time makes us all exiles.”
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“If you are a writer, you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework ... you can still be writing because you have that space.”
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“Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted — and didn't want — it to be.”
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“The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.”
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“We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.”
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“I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.”
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“Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields — and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.”
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“I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating — literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive — perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.”
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“One gains a certain hold on one's life / by boldly casting it aside.”
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“My love: you make me permanent / like old unlovely clay relics / unearthed in the Egypt / of the ancient dead.”
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“Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.”
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“Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.”
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“The blow you can't see coming is the blow that knocks you out ...”
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“If food is poetry is not poetry also food?”
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“Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for its being lost.”
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“There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch.”
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“The 'third man in the ring' ... makes boxing possible.”
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“... love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.”
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“My writing is full of lives I might have led.”
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“Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”
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“When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.”
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“Easier, she thinks, to hate yourself than to respect yourself: it involves less imagination.”
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“One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.”
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“Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.”
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“Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.”
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“... while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' — the very verb 'writing' — always implies masculinity.”
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“Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of 'communication'; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”
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“Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.”
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“The quintessential American city. That fast-beating stubborn heart.”
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“Boxing is an American sport — a 'so-called sport' to many — in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions — loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.”
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“I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.”
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“In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.”
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“Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.”
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“Can compromise be an art? — yes, but a minor art.”
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“[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.”
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“What is a family, after all, except memories? — haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen.”
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“Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.”
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“Writing is the most solitary of arts.”
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“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' — and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.”
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“... I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.”
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“Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.”
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“The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.”
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“... I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.”
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“Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.”
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“Art originates in play — in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.”
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“Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.”
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“... the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.”
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“... that supreme artist of solitude, Emily Dickinson ...”
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“Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?”
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“It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.'”
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“And what is 'art'? — a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.”
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“No person could save another.”
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“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make famous.”
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“... we are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”
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“The very sound of the word, the dazzling exotic color that shimmers inside the word, is a poem of surpassing beauty, complete in this line: Orange.”
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“I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll is infinitely more exciting than being Alice.”
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“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
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“Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.”
Joyce Carol Oates, U.S. writer, poet, educator
(1938)
Oates also has written under the names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.