Joyce Carol Oates

Novelist

1938-06-16

Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

• I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.

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• I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many —culturally-mandated' differences. In First World countries we've evolved beyond mere biology -it isn't the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

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• Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of —playing—. A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which —neighborhoods— have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of —neighbor childrens— houses or play in —backyards—. In the absence of sidewalks in newer —gated— coummunities, children cannot —walk— to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A —playdate— is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been awaiting.

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• For in America this season is decreed —family season—. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don't have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year's season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year's season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie's robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie's frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: "Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you've just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you".

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• Freaky kids like us can't ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of —evolutionary development", my shrink says- "Normal" is just —average", not cool. My latest diagnosis is —A.P.M", Acute Premature Melancholia", usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can't spit it out.

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• And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible.

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• Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

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• For in America this season is decreed —family season—. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don't have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year's season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year's season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie's robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie's frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: —Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you've just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

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• The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

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• A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

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• You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

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• The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

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• Popular! In America, what else matters?

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• It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

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• He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

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• The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

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• Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

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• Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

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• Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

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• The distinction between assistant and intern is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

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