Joyce Carol Oates Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old Joyce Carol Oates quotes, Joyce Carol Oates sayings, and Joyce Carol Oates proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. Joyce Carol Oates
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought. Joyce Carol Oates
The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written. Joyce Carol Oates
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother. Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love. 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
The despairing soul is a rebel. Joyce Carol Oates
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. Joyce Carol Oates
How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another. Joyce Carol Oates
A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible. Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know. Joyce Carol Oates
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable. Joyce Carol Oates
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up. Joyce Carol Oates
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be Joyce Carol Oates
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise. Joyce Carol Oates
There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty Joyce Carol Oates
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language. Joyce Carol Oates
Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community. Joyce Carol Oates
I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart. Joyce Carol Oates
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise. Joyce Carol Oates
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency. Joyce Carol Oates
Of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men. Joyce Carol Oates
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart. Joyce Carol Oates
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read. Joyce Carol Oates
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming. Joyce Carol Oates
The despairing soul is a rebel. Joyce Carol Oates
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity? Joyce Carol Oates