Joyce Carol Oates - Quodid

About

Picture of Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).

Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Despair, surely the least aggressive of sins, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense inwardness, thus independence. The despairing soul is a rebel.

—Joyce Carol Oates

power rebellion despair totalitarianism

Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.

—Joyce Carol Oates

snoring old age womanhood

In love there are two things—bodies and words.

—Joyce Carol Oates

love words bodies

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

—Joyce Carol Oates in Faithless

hunger loneliness food eating starvation

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

—Joyce Carol Oates

darkness desert night

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

—Joyce Carol Oates

imagination preparation daydreaming

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

—Joyce Carol Oates

life reality violence

The experience is there, the reality is there, but how to get at it? Everything I type turns into a lie simply because it is not the truth.

—Joyce Carol Oates

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 in and Flew Away

life people reason

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to "outlive" them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

—Joyce Carol Oates in A Widow's Story

love relationship parents Mom dad

Books

Joyce Carol Oates has the following books quoted on Quodid: