816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer’s vision.

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.

Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn’t read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

I’m nobody’s daughter now. I’m through with that.

Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.

I’ve always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel ‘Black Water,’ I provide a voice for someone who has died and can’t speak for herself.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It’s deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn’t stop you feeling it.

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.