Joyce Carol Oates Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

Joyce Carol Oates
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

Joyce Carol Oates
That supreme artist of solitude, Emily Dickinson...

Joyce Carol Oates
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make famous.

Joyce Carol Oates
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

Joyce Carol Oates
Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

Joyce Carol Oates
The blow you can't see coming is the blow that knocks you out.

Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Joyce Carol Oates
Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

Joyce Carol Oates
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Joyce Carol Oates
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Joyce Carol Oates
He did not like children; he instinctively feared their honesty.

Joyce Carol Oates
The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Joyce Carol Oates
Near the point of impact, time accelerates to the speed of light.

Joyce Carol Oates
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

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

Joyce Carol Oates
One gains a certain hold on one's life
by boldly casting it aside.

Joyce Carol Oates
The quintessential American city. That fast-beating stubborn heart.

Joyce Carol Oates
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

Joyce Carol Oates
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

Joyce Carol Oates
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off a light.

Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.

Joyce Carol Oates
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

Joyce Carol Oates
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Joyce Carol Oates
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

Joyce Carol Oates
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Joyce Carol Oates