816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.

As our great American philosopher William James has said, an individual has as many selves as there are individuals whom he knows. There isn’t the slightest hypocrisy in this, but only pragmatic ethics. For not all persons are worthy of our acquaintance, and not all persons require equal time from us. You save your most valuable ‘personality’ for the most valuable persons you know.

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully ‘comprehended’ narrative – this is the greatest happiness of the writer’s life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of ’normality.

First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don’t know it at the time.

The hard part of humanity is history. All that’s been done to human beings by other human beings. In the Rocky River Nature Preserve you didn’t have to think of such things.

Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.

Loving Felix she’d acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she’d acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, “truth” was common property.

THANK YOU but please do not write again. And do not call. I have had enough of you.

Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;.