Nicole

“Never can you climb over this wall, you’re not strong enough; girls aren’t strong enough; girls aren’t big enough; your body is fragile and breakable, like a doll; your body is a doll; your body is for others to admire and to pet; your body is to be used by others, not used by you; your body is a luscious fruit for others to bite into and to savor; your body is for others, not for you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“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

“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

“All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.”
― Sigmund Freud