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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.

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
Water
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Fluid
Facts
Concrete
Ends
Sand
Even
Fixed
Time
Misery
Like
Forgotten
Wasn

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
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Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
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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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I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
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Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
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She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
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I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.
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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.
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I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.
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Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
Joyce Carol Oates
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After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Joyce Carol Oates
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It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Exotic: meaning you're desired. For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates