Nicole

“A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

“What are we to make of the stubborn bitter truth that one's legitimacy is judged by whether one appears to be ''happy'' or ''unhappy''; that one's work is somehow assessed in terms of the spiritual uplift it offers? ''Happiness'' is predicated as a cultural norm, so that any deviation from it, however justified, however inescapable, arouses not only pity but reproach. As true as this might be for male writers, it is all the more true for female writers, since there is a violation of some unspoken rule in the very fact that a woman writes - that is, thinks.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never “collapse,” only just fade gradually away?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term—peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Doll-Master: And Other Tales of Terror