Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

“Only where there is life can there be home.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Since thirteen, she’d been preparing. She wasn’t beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. […] There were guys - older guys - she’d yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Parading around like she owns the place."

This would be charged of women and girls who exhibited themselves: their bodies. Particularly if their bodies were imperfect in obvious ways– too fat. Appearing in public when they should be ashamed of how they looked or in any case aware of how they looked. Of how unsparing eyes would latch onto them, assessing. Never was such a charge made of men or boys.

There appeared to be no masculine equivalent for "making a spectacle, parading around."

As, you'd discover, there was no masculine equivalent for "bitch, slut.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“She feel these hands tremble, and she could feel Mr. Kidder’s excitement. How eager she was to be gone from this room. Her heart was beating in mild revulsion from the man’s touch, but Katya forced herself to remain still, politely unresisting. In Mr. Kidder’s eyes, which brimmed with moisture, Katya saw such tenderness for her, such desire, or love, she felt that her throat might close, she might begin to cry. Gravely Mr. Kidder lowered his face to hers. Katya held her breath, but he just brushed his lips against her forehead and did not try to kiss her on the mouth.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder’s warm mouth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you ad kiss you and kiss him back! The old man’s mouth and Katya Spivak’s mouth! How could you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don't know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn't turn out to be true.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Man Crazy

“She could feel these hands tremble, and she could feel Mr. Kidder’s excitement. How eager she was to be gone from this room. Her heart was beating in mild revulsion from the man’s touch, but Katya forced herself to remain still, politely unresisting. In Mr. Kidder’s eyes, which brimmed with moisture, Katya saw such tenderness for her, such desire, or love, she felt that her throat might close, she might begin to cry. Gravely Mr. Kidder lowered his face to hers. Katya held her breath, but he just brushed his lips against her forehead and did not try to kiss her on the mouth.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“If this was a flirtation — and it felt like a flirtation — it was like no other flirtation in Katya’s experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Don't let anyone tell you Joyce Carol Oates is not Shakespeare; she knows everything just like Shakespeare did. She knows what it's like to be beautiful and what it's like to be in a car accident and what it's like to be a gas-station attendant planning a robbery. She knows.”
― Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood

“İflah olmamak" bir yetişkinin senin davranışlarına itiraz etmesinden başka nedir ki?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“Only care for me. If you can't love me.
Only don't ignore me...”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts