Joyce Carol Oates - Boxing Quotes

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It's [boxing's] most immediate appeal is that of the spectacle, in itself wordless, lacking a language, that requires others to define it, celebrate it, complete it.

Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening.

Joyce Carol Oates
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing — for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Joyce Carol Oates
[The] third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is an American sport — a 'so-called sport' to many — in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions — loathing, revulsion, righteous indignation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

Joyce Carol Oates