816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Henry James’s later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it’s transcribed into written prose.

In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term – peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.

Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.

I learned you don’t discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

A jury is as bright as the dumbest member of the jury.

I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don’t want to get up. She’s so much more calming than my husband.

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She’d become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks – but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There’s a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can’t alter.