"Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 4 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The quiet people just do their work."
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"The worst cynicism: a belief in luck."
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"It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either."
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"A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?"
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"Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse."
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"The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole."
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"I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily."
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"We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable."
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"The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming."
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"Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree."
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"Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal."
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"All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you."
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"Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind."
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"Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms."
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"A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it."
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"Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning."
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"I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It's so wonderful, going to bed."
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"Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms."
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"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."
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