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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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Famous Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

“You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.”

PeopleIfsThinkingKindChildrenTwoHardWholeWould BeTurnsAnimalChildhoodLike YouCreaturesAdultsAll KindsMessSubstanceHopelessSplitsSurvivedCandyTurmoilHandyLavaUncomplicatedSeethingHard Candy
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over.”

WorldFirstsKindStatesHandsResearchArmyFellowsLifetimeInspiredMemoirAppealsAnalysisUpsetFascinatingAcademicAssociatesObsessiveBroodingImpassionedInsomniac
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)”

WritingBelieveKindSelfCoursesIndividualNovelPossibilitySuperiorsFollyHeroicHumankindOscarsTranscendenceGrandeurPrevailingLoneWildeAda
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”

WritingMindKindMightPoetryLanguageSocialVoiceCommunicationOrdinaryProseDelicateDiscourseSpidersWitchcraftTeaseUnfathomableSly
Book:(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities
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“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”

HumansKindTwoFactsEyeHuman BeingsLossBrainTelevisionColorScreensDimensionsFlatsAtomsDotsLamentReassuringDrained
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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