Winner of a National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal apart from five Pulitzer Prize nominations, Joyce Carol Oates need no introduction. Her brilliant piece of work says much about her acclaimed writing career that has created a niche for her as an American writer, novelist, essayist and playwright. Oates is a prodigious writer and was born with a love for literature and writing. Lewis Carroll’s book, ‘Alice's Adventures in Wonderland’ caused the most profound literary influence that changed the course of her life. And rest as they say is history. Oates began writing when she was 14. She made her debut in 1963 with the short story, ‘By the North Gate’. Ever since then, Oates has penned more than 40 novels, plays, poetry, non-fiction and short stories. Her most famous novel is ‘We Were the Mulvaneys’. Most of her works revolve around the theme of rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally supernatural. Violence also features as a constant in her work. These themes are also visible in her quotes that say much of life and living. Go through his section and get inspired with a new perspective of life through some of Joyce Carol Oates’ quotes.
If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.
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.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.
Joyce Carol Oates
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.
