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“For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Memories #Choices #Action
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“Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Interesting #Sometimes #Reviews
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“Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Art #Moral #Great Art
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“How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Lovely #Looks #World
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“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Reading #Book #Mean
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“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Never Change
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“Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Writing #Apology #Want
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“Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Editors #Sympathetic #Critics
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“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But Âexpect the worst.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Heart #Light #Hopeful
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“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.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Evil #Victim #Attractive
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“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Writing #Soul #Cards
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“Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Running #Thinking #Imagination
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“The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Work #Luck #Belief
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“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.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Change #Time #Tunnels
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“"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Life #Principles
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“Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Artist #People #Personality
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“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Wall #Writing #Space
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“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Humility #Passion #Forget
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“The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Life #Memorable #Unrequited Love
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“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Gone #Sacred #Moments
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“Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Running #Thinking #Feet
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“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Loneliness #Realizing #Hungry
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“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Life #Boxing #Determined
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“Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Dream #Art #Disappointment
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“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Inspiring #Creativity #Mean
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“The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Suicide #Party #Grieving
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“It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
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“I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Space #Juncture #Standing
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“If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Encouragement #Party #Needs
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“Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates
#Art #Writing #Creative
