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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.


“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“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.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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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”
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“In love there are two things - bodies and words. ”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“When you discover yourself lying on the ground, limp and unresisting, head in the dirt, and helpless, the earth seems to shift forward as a presence; hard, emphatic, not mere surface but a genuine force—there is no other word for it but presence. To keep in motion is to keep in time and to be stopped, stilled, is to be abruptly out of time, in another time-dimension perhaps, an alien one, where human language has no resonance. Nothing to be said about it expresses it, nothing touches it, it’s an absolute against which nothing human can be measured…Moving through space and time by way of your own volition you inhabit an interior consciousness, a hallucinatory consciousness, it might be said, so long as breath, heartbeat, the body’s autonomy hold; when motion is stopped you are jarred out of it. The interior is invaded by the exterior. The outside wants to come in, and only the self’s fragile membrane prevents it.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“Every scar in my face is worth it.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.”
Joyce Carol Oates
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