816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.