816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?

A familiar story, Marya instructs herself – a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.

How exhausted I am suddenly! – though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling – almost – exhilarated.

If you’re living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It’s in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

Often in gothic novels there’s a large house, an estate, and it’s symbolic of that culture. Usually it’s sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it’s a whole community.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied.

Living’s immediacy, you go full sail, you’re in a fever of motion. Until it’s safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, “Yes I was happy then, yes now it’s all over I can see I was happy then.” Maybe that’s the advantage of dying?

Exotic: meaning you’re “desired.” For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.