Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“The best revenge is living well without you. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, ed.

“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless : Tales of Transgression

“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, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

“In love there are two things - bodies and words. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless : Tales of Transgression

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.”
― 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

“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know

“If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale

“There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story

“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde