816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one’s generosity? Why regret one’s impulsiveness, one’s misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you’d written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don’t cherish us as we’d cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies.

I work very slowly. It’s like building a ladder, where you’re building your own ladder rung by rung, and you’re climbing the ladder. It’s not the best way to build a ladder, but I don’t know any other way.

After my parents passed away – in 2000 and 2003 – I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

When you give up struggle, there’s a kind of love.

There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.

Sick? – What’s sick? Who is ‘well’? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent ‘well’?