Joyce Carol Oates

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

-So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. ("Family")

A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.

Be daring, take on anything. Don__ labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem." This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called __ulture_ _ and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

I feel very transparent in myself. I__ more of an observer. I__ interested in what__ going on. I__ not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people _ but when I__ not with them I don__ have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.

There are some secrets so toxic you can__ share. Especially if you love who it is you__ have to share with.

These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.