"A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 11 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last."
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"Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else."
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"When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover."
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"There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better."
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"For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage."
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"You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity."
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"Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?"
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"None of the rest of my life figures here."
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"When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?"
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"God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath."
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"Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth."
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"You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains."
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"Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked."
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"I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way."
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"... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing."
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"This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash."
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"Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child."
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"Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us."
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"The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people."
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