"Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 1 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'"
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"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
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"I never change, I simply become more myself."
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"How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look."
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"Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality."
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"Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read."
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"Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light."
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"For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable."
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"If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it."
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"I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression."
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"And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices."
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"Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst."
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"Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!"
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"See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be"
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"Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing."
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"Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be."
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"I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."
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"When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer."
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"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."
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