816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Recently she had been going through a period of adolescent melancholia, often talking with her mother, a nurse, about death. She would, she hoped, be some day reincarnated as a cat.

Like many shy people, once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand to change the subject, and he had no idea how to engage another person. Like a runaway vehicle, he plunged on, heedless.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you’re no longer their child.

Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be – to become – normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.

How lawyers make work for one another! You’re all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.

Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. “Pa?

But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.

SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.

If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine’s age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn’t hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn’t be for you.