816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it’s gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for ‘serious literary’ fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.

A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn’t time for it all and if he couldn’t do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.

How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray – here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.

Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be.

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.

You are writing for your contemporaries – not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.