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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?

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
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Hurt
Practiced
Hope
Entered
Wells
Teens
Well
Irony
Distinction
Mouth
Mouths

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
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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.
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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
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Tragedy is the highest form of art.
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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
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Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.
Joyce Carol Oates
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What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
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Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
Joyce Carol Oates
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...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
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God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
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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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
Joyce Carol Oates