Joyce Carol Oates - Body Quotes

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The skin is the most impermeable barrier of the body. It is always thirsty. Its thirst is insatiable. Human thirsts are satisfied from time to time, but the thirst of the human skin is never satisfied so long as it lives.

Joyce Carol Oates
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

Joyce Carol Oates
Art originates in play — in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.

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 body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Joyce Carol Oates
The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.

Joyce Carol Oates