Joyce Carol Oates - Truth Quotes

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You're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Joyce Carol Oates

There is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

Joyce Carol Oates

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

Joyce Carol Oates

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Joyce Carol Oates