Top 15 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

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.

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

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

"There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it."

"Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

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.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing — how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals' — and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

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.

"Erotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive."