Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
Joyce Carol Oates
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Else
Disruption
Someone
Collision
World
Confusion
Private
Motivational
Grow
Grows
Inspirational
Disruptions
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
Joyce Carol Oates
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
Joyce Carol Oates
The despairing soul is a rebel.
Joyce Carol Oates
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
Joyce Carol Oates
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
Joyce Carol Oates
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
Joyce Carol Oates
And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
Joyce Carol Oates
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of wrongful events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Joyce Carol Oates
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
Joyce Carol Oates
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
Joyce Carol Oates
