Joyce Carol Oates

I have no inner life. I have no __ntimate_ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.(_)Others_ shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They__e gone

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it__ inaudible.

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

There__ a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It__ a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation_ I have no idea why

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many __ulturally-mandated_ differences. In First World countries we__e evolved beyond mere biology -it isn__ the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children__ books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she__ been a little girl. There hadn__ been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Popular! In America, what else matters?

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

. . . 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.

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.