816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one’s willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

You don’t have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

Love is an indescribable sensation – perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and “brooding” windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people’s lives when they go in one direction, not another.

I don’t think that any ‘ism’ is higher than literature or art. So I’m a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

It is required that we must be fiercely beloved by one individual in order to exist: for Sabbath, Haley was that individual.