816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

An adult man possesses the power to enter your soul. A boy has no power, The power to hurt, maybe, but not the power to enter your soul.

Love is not enough to keep us from harm.

Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.

A man is fearful of lonely in a woman.

Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York.

And so it became a household of silence as if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.

You can’t deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the ’perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others’ eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.

I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility.