Quote

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

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
Flight
Omnipotence
Flying
Shifts
Fantasy
Rapid
Childhood
Fantasies
Capacity
Rapids
Moments
Miraculous
Dream
Dreaming
Fosters
Aviation
Stirs

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
Joyce Carol Oates
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I never change, I simply become more myself.
Joyce Carol Oates
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All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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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Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
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
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
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 heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The best revenge is living well without you.
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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It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
Joyce Carol Oates