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Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

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
Brushes
Fleeting
Voice
Past
Ideas
Insubstantial
Moths
Brush

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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One man's insanity is another man's genius someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
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Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
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The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last nothing can guarantee it.
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Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.
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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?
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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
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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.
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Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
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Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
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The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
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Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.
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My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
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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.
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
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Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.
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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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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
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
Joyce Carol Oates