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Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.

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
Evoked
Devastating
Told
Truth
Must
Even

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Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
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Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
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The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
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Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
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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.
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See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
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Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
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The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
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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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
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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Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored or damned with condescending praise.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The books I read I do enjoy, very much otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.
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