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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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Famous Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

“Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.”

MaySeemsCitiesMiddleSweetArmsLoversWalkingKissingLateEuropeBoundsSmellParksBenchesMiddle AgedSleepyLilacBudapestPark Benches
Book:(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities
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“I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.”

ThinkingWellsMayHas BeensSeemsAmericaEasyParentMy OwnGenerationsIntegrityResilienceFascinatedGrandparentPersonal History
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.”

IfsHumansSeemsMightWrittenRegretDiscoveryLettersObviousSellingGenerosityInevitableCherishRecklessRetrospect
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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