Quote

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.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Facts
Must
Alter
Wake
Years
Comfort
Think
Perhaps
Thinking
Morning
Gone
Fact

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
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The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
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Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
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Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.
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Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
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Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
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These are the moments for which we live.
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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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The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
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My students often say, My roommate read this story and really liked it, and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.
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When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
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The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
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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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In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
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It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
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If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'
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A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
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I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
Joyce Carol Oates