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

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 “eating”

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration.

—Igor Stravinsky

inspiration work eating

Fake food — I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut — is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking.

morality nature deception food eating

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.

health eating drinking

Never eat more than you can lift.

strength food eating gluttony

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.

—Johnny Carson

entertainment television food eating radio