816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Popular! In America, what else matters?

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

Thus the accursed summer passes. Days & nights in hellish succession & poor Puss lies prostrate beneath the attacks of the Dream-Hawks—great carrion birds with wing-spans of ten feet & eyes of blazing coals & cruel talons to rake against my soft cheek & tangle in my hair.

If I could open a vein. Not to inject any shit, I will never weaken like that again, but just to feel the kick of it, the old memory. So this numbness lifts. So I could get back there easier.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.