816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my ‘farm chores’ – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Secrets have always been easy for me, it’s the opposite of secrets that is hard.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man’s body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don’t don’t don’t don’t leave me. DON’T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

The – the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can’t escape. Life was easier then. You just didn’t pick up the phone.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn’t matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never “collapse,” only just fade gradually away?

While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.

I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It’s always something very specific.