“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 words embody them.”
More from Joyce Carol Oates
“In love there are two things, bodies and words.”
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“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
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