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Joyce Carol Oates

28 quotesEssayist · Born Jun 16, 1938 · United States Of America · Female

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), Blonde (2000), and short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. 2Early life and education Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She is the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She was raised Catholic but is now an atheist. Her brother, Fred Jr., was born in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York, and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status" but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence." Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyc

All How To Think (11)Life (8)Reading (5)Books (4)Book Lovers (4)Pleasure Of Reading (4)Coming To Life (4)Bookworm (4)beauty (3)Time (3)The Person You'll Become (3)Revenge (2)Love (2)Art (2)Independence (1)

From “Blonde: A Novel”

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

beauty Life How To Think

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

beauty Life How To Think

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Death Life The End

From “Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature”

Literature grants us few of the consolations and none of the vatic promises of religion, but is our religion nonetheless.

Life Books Coming To Life Reading Pleasure Of Reading

That, by way of a book, we have the ability to transcend what is immediate, what is merely personal, and to enter a consciousness not known to us, in some cases distinctly alien.

Life Books Coming To Life Reading Pleasure Of Reading

Consider the phenomenon of reading, that most mysterious of acts. It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul.

Life Books Coming To Life Reading Pleasure Of Reading

There are pleasures in reading so startling, so intense, they shade into pain. The realization that one’s life has been irrevocably altered by . . . can it be mere words? Print on a page? The most life-rending discoveries involve what has in fact never been thought, never given form, until another’s…

Life Books Coming To Life Reading Pleasure Of Reading

From “A quote by Joyce Carol Oates”

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Hope Light Expectations worst

From “We Were the Mulvaneys”

The best revenge is living well without you.

Revenge Living well

From “Joyce Carol Oates”

Most of the time I do nothing, and the fact of time passing so relentlessly is a source of anguish to me. There are not enough hours in the day. Yet I waste most of my time, in daydreaming, in drawing faces on pieces of paper.

Time Passing Time Daydreaming

From “Wheel of Love and Other Stories ”

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

Goal Oriented Dreamer Positive Trait

From “The collector of hearts”

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

Love Sacrifice Taken For Granted Settlement

From “Solstice”

The best revenge is living well without you.

Revenge Living Fully Strong Bravery Independence

From “A Quote By”

The best revenge is living well without you.

Firm Tenacious moving Letting Go Moving Forward

From “Solstice by Joyce Carol Oates”

I never change, I simply become more myself.

The Person You'll Become How To Think Philosophy self

From “It Occurs to Me That I Am America”

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Blood Life Generations

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

How To Think Truth and Evil Evil Is The Mind

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

How To Think Reading Readers Are Leaders Best Reading Quotes

From “The Oxford Book of American Short Stories”

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Time How To Think The Art of Being

From “The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction”

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

Art How To Think The Person You'll Become Liveliness Discomfort

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