816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

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.

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.