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

About Joyce Carol Oates

Portrait 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...

More quotations from Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

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

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

—Joyce Carol Oates

imagination preparation daydreaming

More quotations tagged with “despair”

Somewhere in the world at that moment, there was a birth, a death, a sunrise, and a sunset. There was despair, and a burst of laughter, a promise broken, and a vow made.
And there was this kiss.

—Lydia Kang in A Beautiful Poison

laughter death despair birth sunset sunrise

Despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality — it is a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

—Philip Slater

reality despair illusion fantasy

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort, you will get neither comfort nor truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

truth despair comfort

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

—Edmund Burke

action work despair

Betty Williams, a 1977 Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Northern Ireland, once witnessed the bombing death of Irish children, and a little girl died in Williams's arms. The girl's legs had been severed in the explosion and thrown across the street from where the woman held the bleeding child. Williams went home in shock and despair. Later, the full impact of what she'd seen jolted her awake. She stepped outside, screaming out in the middle of the night. She knocked on doors that might easily have opened with weapons pointed at her face and cried, "What kind of people have we become that we would allow children to be killed on our streets?" Within four hours the city was awake and there were sixteen thousand names on petitions for peace.

peace weapons children bombs death shock despair