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For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
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
Confused
Slow
Lifetime
Terminated
Happiness
Summarize
Words
Starks
Pain
Stark
Much
Crowded
Motion
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
Joyce Carol Oates
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
Joyce Carol Oates
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
Joyce Carol Oates
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Joyce Carol Oates
That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Joyce Carol Oates
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
Joyce Carol Oates
I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.
Joyce Carol Oates
celebrate while you can
Joyce Carol Oates
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.
Joyce Carol Oates
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Joyce Carol Oates
Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?
Joyce Carol Oates
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Joyce Carol Oates
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
