"An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 10 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Tragedy is the highest form of art."
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"There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite."
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"Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one."
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"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."
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"the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon."
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"Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows."
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"The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them."
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"The regional voice is the universal voice."
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"It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you."
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"Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live."
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"What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory."
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"Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see."
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"My writing is full of lives I might have led."
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"The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence."
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"After love a formal feeling comes."
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"Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive."
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"She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all."
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"At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say."
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"Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be."
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