Joyce Carol Oates

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

— Joyce Carol Oates

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

— Joyce Carol Oates

In love there are two things -- bodies and words.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

— Joyce Carol Oates

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

No one seems to have said that it was an appropriate death though we know that all deaths are appropriate.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I admit that I have no fixed income like your friend, and I have no desire for it,” he said to Faye. “I like adventure. I don’t dare prophesy where my liking for adventure will lead.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

The plaque at the front of the courtroom, high on the wall, was permanent and yet its words were new each time Jack read them, read them half against his will, his eyes moving restlessly forward and up to them while testimony droned on: Conscience Speaks the Truth.

— Joyce Carol Oates

… like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth ….

— Joyce Carol Oates

What is family, after all, except memories?—haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen.

— Joyce Carol Oates

She ransacked her mind, but there was nothing in it.

— Joyce Carol Oates