Quote

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

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
Enjoy
Musical
Individual
Early
Certain
Failing
Picnic
Find
Worth
Picnics
Leave
Admission
Comedy
Individuals
Party
Price
Society
Fail

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I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
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I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
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The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
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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.
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Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.
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The regional voice is the universal voice.
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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
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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.
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Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
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The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
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The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of communication the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
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Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
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Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.
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I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
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No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
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Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
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